Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

We examine the diffusion of sustainable planning and design concepts into neighbourhood development projects, based on findings of a survey of planners in all 180 cities of five Southern California counties. Sustainable neighbourhood development has particular significance in Southern California owing to the regions's rapid growth. We compare ‘typical’ and ‘innovative’ neighbourhood developments to determine whether sustainable planning and design concepts are being incorporated in these projects. Although planners agree that ‘innovative’ projects are more likely than ‘typical’ projects to incorporate sustainable planning and design concepts, sustainability is not a high priority even in innovative neighbourhood projects. Our respondents identified significant barriers to and limited opportunities for encouraging sustainable neighbourhood development. These trends in planning and design appear likely to continue unless strong policy and other mechanisms are adopted to encourage sustainable neighbourhood development. The paper concludes with recommendations to promote more sustainable neighbourhood development.

An important debate in the literature on exurban sprawl is whether low-density development results from residential demand, as operationalized by developers, or from exclusionary zoning policies. Central to this debate is the purpose of zoning, which could alternatively be a mechanism to increase the utility of residents by separating land uses and reducing spillover effects of development, or an obstacle to market mechanisms that would otherwise allow the realization of residential preferences. To shed light on this debate, we developed an agent-based model of land-use change to study how the combined effects of zoning-enforcement levels, density preferences, preference heterogeneity, and negative externalities from development affect exurban development and the utility of residents. Our computational experiments show that sprawl is not inevitable, even when most of the population prefers low densities. The presence of negative externalities consistently encourage sprawl while decreasing average utility and flattening the utility distribution. Zoning can reduce sprawl by concentrating development in specific areas, but in doing so decreases average utility and increases inequality. Zoning does not internalize externalities; instead, it contains externalities in areas of different development density so that residents bear the burden of the external effects of the density they prefer. Effects vary with residential preference distributions and levels of zoning enforcement. These initial investigations can help inform policy makers about the conditions under which zoning enforcement is preferable to free-market development and vice versa. Future work will focus on the environmental impacts of different settlement patterns and the role land-use and market-based policies play in this relationship.

The value of effective collaboration has become increasingly critical for organizational performance and agility. Along with technical and managerial strategies, the workspace spatial environment needs to be recognized and studied for its impact on collaboration and interactive behavior at work. Most spatial parameters studied in the workplace research literature are workstation-scale characteristics. However, these may not sufficiently describe the variety of shared spaces in which collaborative work and interactions take place. Based on a two-year multiple-site field study of workplace settings, this paper explores the space typology of a wide spectrum of formal and informal collaborative spaces, and it introduces a new set of layout-scale quantitative indices to describe the amount and distribution of collaborative spaces in a workplace. This research tested layout-scale spatial variables and compared them with workstation-scale variables in order to determine how well these variables predict the occupants' perception of the support from their workplace spatial environment for collaborative work and the distractions from others' interactive behavior in the work environment. The design implications of the findings are explored, and future research directions are identified.

In discussions about alternative modes of residential development, such as those proposed under the New Urbanist, Smart Growth, or sustainable cities movements, a common assumption is that planning is capable of implementing these visions. In this study I seek to ascertain the ability of planning to guide residential development. In contrast to much of the existing research into planning capability, which evaluates individual implementations, this study uses municipality-wide built-form data. Before and after comparisons are carried out for the primary study site, the town of Markham, Ontario (Canada), where a New-Urbanist-inspired development philosophy has been in place since the early 1990s. Results are compared with those from the city of Vaughan, an adjacent municipality that has maintained a market-led development approach. Findings are that planning is capable of moderately accelerating positive trends and moderately retarding negative trends.

Land-use models are a well-established component of planning support systems to support urban planning for and with a local community. Existing models are based on either land-suitability analysis or facility-network performance analysis, reflecting two major approaches in modelling for spatial planning—land-use-allocation or land-use-change modelling, and location-allocation modelling. In this study, we propose an agent-based approach to combine methods from both approaches in a single system. We argue and illustrate in a case study that the integrated model is better able to account for a difference in nature between area-type land uses (for example, housing, industry, nature), on the one hand, and facility-type land uses (for example, retailing, schools, medical services), on the other. The model is able to generate a limited set of different land-use-plan alternatives by systematically varying macrocharacteristics of facility networks. The results of a case study suggest that the model generates meaningful sets of land-use-plan alternatives in reasonable computation time.

This paper presents a two-level conceptual framework and a two-level ontology-mapping approach for ontology-driven on-line tour planning. The conceptual framework includes an abstract level and a representation level. The abstract level identifies two types of participants (a traveler and travel information providers), two types of information (internal and external information), and two types of processes (implicit and explicit process). Subsequently, at the representation level, the two types of participants are represented as two types of agents, the Internet agent for the traveler and the Internet agent for the travel-information providers, along with information and processes associated with them through an agent-based design. Corresponding to the two types of participants, two ontologies (ontology for the traveler and ontology for the travel-information providers) are used to represent their perspectives. The two ontologies are mapped at two levels: conceptual mapping and property-value match. Conceptual mapping uses formal concept analysis to identify equivalent or overlapping concepts between the two ontologies. Subsequently, the property values of mapped concepts are evaluated in order to create a tour plan that matches a traveler's preferences with the information provided at tourism websites. A hypothetical case study is used to illustrate the conceptual framework and ontology-mapping approach.

Neighborhood satisfaction is an important component of life satisfaction. As a contributor to life satisfaction, neighborhood satisfaction is influenced by individual and household background variables. However, there is limited understanding of how physical environments influence neighborhood satisfaction. This paper examines the effect of landscape components (structures, pavement, trees) and land use (residential, commercial, and open space) on neighborhood satisfaction. A survey of 276 respondents in College Station, Texas, was georeferenced and analyzed with landscape components and land-use GIS data. A structural equation model (SEM) examines the relationships among background variables, land use, landscape components, and neighborhood satisfaction simultaneously. Landscape components and land use were both found to play an important role in neighborhood satisfaction. Trees were found to have a positive effect on neighborhood satisfaction while structures were negative. Pavement, when commercial land use and structures in the SEM model were accounted for, shows a positive relationship with neighborhood satisfaction, suggesting that not all pavement is seen as undesirable. Commercial land use was also found to have a negative effect on neighborhood satisfaction, while background variables have no significant impact. The amount and arrangement of land uses and landscape components in neighborhoods may improve the well-being of residents by increasing their neighborhood satisfaction.

Sustainable systems utilise renewable energy sources and recycle materials effectively. In theory, solar radiation provides abundant energy to sustain humanity. Our capacity to utilise available sources, however, is limited and competition for resources is expected to increase in the future. Spatial organisation and design of the physical environment influences two aspects of sustainable energy transition: assimilation of renewables and energy consumption. How can spatial planning and design support the transition from fossil fuels to a sustainable energy regime? Natural ecosystems constitute one source of inspiration. They are described with the help of ecological concepts; some of which reveal how energy flow is optimised in nature. Ecological concepts and ecosystem strategies are not limited to the description of natural phenomena; they can also inform energy-conscious planning and design of neighborhoods, cities, and entire regions. We identify and discuss nine ecological concepts with relevance to energy-conscious spatial planning and design.

The spatial lag specification is often used in spatial econometrics. The choice of an appropriate spatial weighting matrix is an important outstanding methodological problem in the quantitative spatial dependence literature. This paper proposes applying a component-wise model-boosting algorithm to deal with the issue of the choice of a spatial weighting matrix amongst a predetermined set of alternatives. The resulting procedure is computationally simple and easy to implement. I present an empirical application of the proposed methodology. Some possible extensions to a more general setting are discussed.

Interurban-level focus during the last decade has shifted from the compact city towards a polycentric urban framework. The ability to define consistent urban structures and also link them with sustainability goals has been hindered by inconsistent evaluation methods for density and mixed functionality in a polycentric framework. The aim of this research is to test and combine various methods from these perspectives in order to define more reliable and consistent descriptions of urban structures. The methods used are spatial-density modelling using kernel convolution, a polycentric density estimation, and methods depicting mixed functionality and the association between density and mixed functionality. The empirical findings relate to planning goals at both national and international level. The study region is the municipality of Strängnäs, within the Stockholm City Region since 1997. Results from the analysis reveal urban development towards further segregated land use and sprawl, as well as a decreasing link with a polycentric urban scheme. The methods developed for depicting urban form could be useful tools in the planning process and may reinforce the possibility for analysing links between urban form and sustainability aspects. This improved knowledge in turn could contribute towards formulating future planning principles.