Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

The quality of the urban living environment is strongly related to the provision and planning or design of public facilities, of which NIMBY, not-in-my-back-yard, facilities are often resisted by residents. Therefore, selecting the location for NIMBY facilities has become more and more difficult and time consuming. In Taiwan in particular, when the tenure landholding system is adopted, along with financial difficulties, frequent mass protests take place in relation to environmental issues, and consequently lead to financial development issues for the country. Hence, the interaction between the government and the public becomes critical and urgent. O'Hare believes that NIMBY facilities can be seen as a prisoner's dilemma game in game theory, and Camerer also points out that public issues such as environmental concerns are also a type of prisoner's dilemma game. This research adopts an alternative methodology to that of Axelrod, in which a computer simulation was used to compare interactive strategies in prisoner's dilemma games. On the basis of a deductive analysis comparing different interactive strategies in prisoner's dilemma games, in this research an experiment was conducted to verify empirically the results of that analysis in the context of siting NIMBY facilities. The experiment has once again proven that tit-for-tat is indeed a comparatively more effective strategy than the others, not only for the player under consideration, but also for the society as a whole, with the assumption of symmetric information, and it can be used as a reference when political decisions are to be made from the government regarding NIMBY facilities.

We present a theoretical model of residential growth that emphasises the path-dependent nature of urban sprawl patterns. The model is founded on the monocentric urban economic model and uses a cellular automata (CA) approach to introduce endogenous neighbourhood effects. Households are assumed both to like and to dislike the density of their neighbourhood, and are assumed to trade-off this density with housing space consumption and commuting costs. Discontinuous spatial patterns emerge from that trade-off, with the size of suburban clusters varying with time and distance to the centre. We use space–time diagrams inspired from 1D elementary CA to visualise changes in spatial patterns through time and space, and undertake sensitivity analyses to show how the pattern and timing of sprawl are affected by neighbourhood preferences, income level, commuting costs, or by imposing a green belt.

We present a model of the interaction of segregation and suburbanization in determining residential location. The model incorporates differential income between two classes of agents, a simplified market mechanism for the purchase of housing, and a simple geographic structure of one central city and four symmetrically arranged suburbs. Agents derive utility from neighborhood racial composition, the size of their lot, private amenities that are specific to neighborhoods, and public amenities that stretch across municipalities. We find that the public-amenities term leads to a positive-feedback loop in which migration to suburbs increases the public amenities in those municipalities while lowering amenities in the central city, thus sparking further migration. When the minority agents are uniformly less affluent than the majority agents, this dynamic produces discontinuity in segregation as measured by centralization. Such discontinuities are typical of first-order phase transitions. When minority and majority incomes overlap, significant regions appear over which there are multistable equilibria at high and low levels of segregation, along with considerable sensitivity to the initial distribution of minority agents. We discuss the implications of these findings.

A new methodology is presented that measures density in urban systems. By combining highly detailed height measurements with, amongst others, topographical data we are able to quantify urban volume. This new approach is demonstrated in two separate case studies that relate to the temporal and spatial dimension of the urban environment, respectively. In the first study the growth of the city of Amsterdam over the past century is studied. The urban-volume indicator is used to visualise and quantify the urban extension and intensification process. To critically analyse the spatiotemporal development of Amsterdam the self-organising-map approach is applied. Special attention is given to highlighting any signs of recent polynuclear development. The second case study compares the building-height frequency and spatial distribution of high-density zones in the four major Dutch cities. Additionally, the presence of built-up areas and the actual urban-volume values are explained simultaneously using a Heckman selection model.

Though design for building performance is traditionally considered an evaluative act, current developments in the theory and technology of digital design are promoting new directions for performance-based models of design. This paper presents a theoretical basis for understanding the current shift in performance-based design and proposes a model of performance-based design in architecture, termed performative design. Automated processes related to the impact of environmental forces on form generation in digital design are the content of experimental processes upon which the paper reports. In the theoretical introduction the terms performative design and performative architecture are defined and discussed. Topics related to the current movement towards performance-based design in architecture, such as the role of topology, parametric design, associative geometry, and generative processes, are presented, and their implications for, and influence upon, performative design are discussed. An experimental design example in architectural design is demonstrated to illustrate various methodological issues in performative design.

This paper reviews a large body of regulatory literature and applies four major debates to the field of building regulation and control. We find that this field has attracted little attention of regulatory scholars, whilst fields such as the ‘natural’ or ‘occupational’ environment are often addressed in regulatory studies. We furthermore find that studies of building regulation and control often lack theoretical descriptions or applications. We argue that such details are necessary for a better understanding of building regulations and control.

A classic problem in planning is districting, which aims to partition a given area into a specified number of subareas according to required criteria. Size, compactness, and contiguity are among the most frequently used districting criteria. While size and compactness may be interpreted differently in different contexts, contiguity is an unambiguous topological property. A district is said to be contiguous if all locations in it are ‘connected’—that is, one can travel between any two locations in the district without leaving it. This paper introduces a new integer-programming-based approach to districting modeling, which enforced contiguity constraints independently of any other criteria that might be additionally imposed. Three experimental models are presented, and tested with sample data on the forty-eight conterminous US states. A major implication of this paper is that the exact formulation of a contiguity requirement allows planners to address diverse sets of districting criteria.

The present paper examines whether the potential advantages of the expanding practice of web-based public participation only complement the benefits of the traditional techniques, or whether they are empowering enough to replace them. The question is examined in a real-world case of neighborhood revitalization, in which both techniques were practiced simultaneously. Comparisons are made at four major planning junctions, in order to study the contributions of each technique to the qualities of involvement, trust, and empowerment. The results show that web-based participants not only differ from the participation of traditional practices, but they also differ from each other on the basis of their type of web participation. The results indicate that web-based participation is an effective complementary means of public participation, but it cannot replace the traditional unmediated techniques.

Owing to the richer set of concepts which are involved in activity-based transportation models, the potential advantages of an activity-based approach for air quality purposes have been recognized for a long time. However, models that have been developed along these lines are still scarce. In this research the activity-based model ALBATROSS was used in combination with the emission model MIMOSA to assess the travelled distances and the mobile source emissions produced by passenger cars in the Netherlands. The fact that this approach is based on hourly travel and emission values, rather than on aggregated results or peak hour values, a common practice within other traditional models, is an important added value. The predicted values seem to correspond well with the reported values from the Dutch Scientific Statistical Agency. Predictions for travelled distances overestimated the reported values by approximately 8%. Predictions for emissions of nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and particular matter differed by 16%, 11%, 9%, and 3%, respectively, from the officially reported values. This paper is novel in the sense that it both reports on the applied methodology and presents the practical results from a case study of the activity-based emission modelling approach.

Occurrences of crime are complex phenomena. They are the result of a large number of interrelated elements which can include environmental factors as well as complex human behaviours. Traditionally, crime occurrences have been modelled using statistical techniques, and although such approaches are useful, they face difficulties in providing predictive analyses and with the integration of behavioural information. Also, it is particularly difficult to account for the strongly influential effect of local urban form. Agent-based modelling is a relatively new modelling paradigm that has generated a considerable amount of interest. An agent is an independent component of a system which interacts with other agents and its environment to achieve goals. In this manner, large systems of agents can be created to mimic real scenarios. Most importantly, the agents can incorporate behavioural information to determine how they should achieve their goals, and models can include a highly detailed environment. This paper presents an agent-based model used to predict burglary rates, which, despite its simplicity, yields interesting results. We apply the model to the city of Leeds, UK. The model indicates that the urban configuration in Leeds is a major element in determining the level of crime across the city. It also demonstrates that agent-based modelling is an excellent tool for these types of analyses with much potential.