Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Developing countries experience poor and deteriorating water services where the costs of improvements, water utilities assume, are not affordable by households. However, if water services are hypothetically improved, are households willing to pay? From employment of an attribute-based stated-preference method, the paper examines households' willingness to pay for improvements in water services in a city in south India. Aside of quantity, households are willing to pay for improvements in quality, pressure, frequency of supply, and increased quanta of supply during the dry season. In addition, households prefer regulation in water services, albeit from a public service provider. In Asian countries and other developing country regions households' willingness to pay is substantially higher than the costs of the provision of water, and on a par with mean water tariffs in developed regions of the world.

Modeling land-use change is a prerequisite to understanding the complexity of land-use-change patterns. This paper presents a novel method to model urban land-use change using support-vector machines (SVMs), a new generation of machine learning algorithms used in classification and regression domains. An SVM modeling framework has been developed to analyze land-use change in relation to various factors such as population, distance to roads and facilities, and surrounding land use. As land-use data are generally unbalanced, in the sense that the unchanged data overwhelm the changed data, traditional methods are incapable of classifying relatively minor land-use changes with high accuracy. To circumvent this problem, an unbalanced SVM has been adopted by enhancing the standard SVMs. A case study of Calgary land-use change demonstrates that the unbalanced SVMs can achieve high and reliable performance for land-use-change modeling.

Over the last 10–15 years, urban planners in the Netherlands have been given more policy space for defining area-specific environmental ambitions, in an attempt to promote further the integration of environmental and urban planning. This increased policy space has offered new opportunities, but also poses new challenges for urban planners. Urban planners often appear to struggle with the issue of how to come to an operationalization of area-specific urban environmental quality. Various planning tools exist that can assist planners with these tasks. In this paper we distinguish between ‘substance-oriented’ tools such as environmental impact assessments and ‘process-oriented’ tools that facilitate interaction and consensus building among planners and stakeholders. Recently, in the Netherlands, a distinct type of ‘hybrid’ planning tool has been developed specifically for defining area-based environmental ambitions in spatial plans, coupled with the development of measures for attaining these ambitions. However, little research has been conducted into how these planning tools perform in practice and how this can be understood, especially in comparison with more traditional ‘substance-oriented’ and ‘process-oriented’ planning tools. In this paper we assess the added value of the new hybrid tools on the basis of an analysis of three exemplary case studies. Although the tools seem to be helpful in assisting urban planners to better integration of environmental and spatial planning, there are some aspects that deserve more attention, including the identification of financial consequences of environmental ambitions, and guidelines for dealing with controversies. Future research is recommended into the influence of the hybrid tools on their sociopolitical contexts, their performance in comparison with other hybrid planning tools, and their effective design.

Abstract. This prospective research study was conducted at a government office which moved from an open-plan office with somewhat enclosed workspaces to another open-plan office with open workspaces. The study at the old office was conducted almost one year before the move, and the study at the new office was conducted more than one year after the move. The purpose of this study was threefold: (1) to measure and evaluate changes in patterns of accessibility and visibility due to changes in office layout, (2) to understand the effects of layout changes on observed behaviors, and (3) to determine the effects of layout changes on environmental perception. The study included the analysis of visibility and accessibility of each layout using space syntax techniques, field observations of behaviors, and questionnaire surveys of employees’ perceptions of privacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization. During field observations, movement, visible copresence (ie the number of people visible from a space), and face-to-face interaction were observed along a predefined route in each office. Thirty-five people responded to the questionnaire survey at the old office. Out of the thirty five, only twenty nine were available for survey at the new office. On the basis of the questionnaire survey data, three multi-item scales were constructed in order to measure perceived privacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to organization. Results indicate better visibility and accessibility, increased face-to-face interaction, and improved perceived privacy at the new office. Results also show consistent effects of space on movement, and significant positive correlations between perceived privacy, job satisfaction, and commitment to the organization at these locations, despite significant design differences. Implications of the research results and limitations of the research design are discussed.

This paper examines the relationship between street centrality and densities of commercial and service activities in the city of Bologna, northern Italy. Street centrality is calibrated in a multiple centrality assessment model composed of multiple measures such as closeness, betweenness, and straightness. Kernel density estimation is used to transform datasets of centrality and activities to one scale unit for analysis of correlation between them. Results indicate that retail and service activities in Bologna tend to concentrate in areas with better centralities. The distribution of these activities correlates highly with the global betweenness of the street network, and also, to a slightly lesser extent, with the global closeness. This confirms the hypothesis that street centrality plays a crucial role in shaping the formation of urban structure and land uses.

Given that many spatial interaction (SI) systems are often constituted in large databases with high thematic dimensionality, data complexity reduction tasks are essential. The opportunity exists for researchers to examine the formation of different types of SIs as well as their interdependencies by exploring the patterns embedded in the data. To circumvent the limitations of existing methods of flow data compression and visual exploration, we propose an integrated computational and visual approach, known as VISIDAMIN, for handling both SI data projection and SI data quantization at once. The computational method of self-organizing maps serves as the data mining engine in this process. Using a large domestic air travel dataset as a case study, we examine how the characteristics of the air transport system interact with the SI system to create relationships and structures within the US domestic airline market.

This paper presents a new approach to land-use planning and transportation planning that provides regional planners with a means to achieve their goals without infringing upon local autonomy. The approach focuses on facilitating cooperation between city and regional planners. This is accomplished through two sequential stages: (1) the regional-planning stage and (2) the city-planning stage. In both stages, land-use planning and transportation planning are cast as multiobjective design problems and solved with a genetic algorithm. An example of the approach is presented using data for a medium-sized metropolitan region and a city within it.

At a time of rising concern over urban sprawl and its adverse financial, quality-of-life, and environmental consequences, nodes assume growing importance within urban (and especially metropolitan) planning strategies. Nodes are defined as high-density multifunctional developments featuring a pedestrian-conducive environment and good public-transit accessibility. The article draws from the Toronto experience to explore reasons for the popularity of nodes among planning agencies, their limited capacity over recent years to attract new office and retail development, and difficulties in launching new nodes. It also investigates their problems in meeting walking and public-transit-patronage objectives. The article proposes four means of enhancing the smart growth performance of nodes: (1) improved planning coordination; (2) reliance on both incentives and coercion; (3) investment in public transit systems; (4) merging nodal and corridor approaches.

The major planning theories provide a theoretical foundation for environmental planning. This study extends the major planning theories and develops a robust conceptual framework to measure the key factors influencing local environmental-plan quality. A random sample of forty Californian local comprehensive land-use plans and associated planning processes is analyzed to identify the critical factors influencing environmental-plan quality. Results from multiple regression analysis indicate that regular updating, environmental-information management and sharing, and planners contribute significantly to local environmental-plan quality. The findings expand established planning theories and practice by suggesting ways to improve local environmental-plan quality.

This paper provides an empirical comparison between utility-maximization and regret-minimization perspectives of spatial-choice behaviour. The key difference between these two perspectives is that the regret-minimization perspective implies that the anticipated satisfaction associated with a chosen spatial alternative depends on the anticipated performance of nonchosen alternatives. In order to provide a meaningful statistical comparison, we formulate a model of regret minimization such that it reduces to utility maximization for a given parameter restriction. Estimation results, based on a binary stated travel-mode-choice experiment, show how the regret-based model outperforms its utilitarian counterpart. Furthermore it is shown how participants in the experiment attached relatively much weight to the situation where the nonchosen alternative is slightly better than the chosen one, and they tend to discount larger differences. We show how this concavity of the regret function is in line with the prospect theoretical notion of risk-seeking behaviour in the domain of losses.

This paper evaluates organisational changes in English local authority building-control departments (BCD), in a context in which the adoption and development of management procedure, technique, and process, more commonly associated with corporate private-sector enterprises, are occurring. Referring to data based on twenty-nine interviews with building surveyors, we show that change in building control is complex and contradictory, and best thought of as the emergence of new capacities, competencies, and interactions (of regulation) both within BCD, and between BCD and new actors and agents. This includes the enlargement of the regulatory networks of BCD, through the use of external expert advisors, and by the formation of, sometimes unstable, partnerships in which BCD may work with each other and with clients of building-control services. Such partnerships and networks are part of a complexity of regulation, in which outcomes are not the products of any one professional, or actor, but part of a diversity of overlapping relations and interventions. Such relations, we argue, are part of a process that may undermine, even dismantle, the public provision of building-control services.