Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

A method is described that enables the potential tranquillity of an amenity area, such as a park, green, or square to be assessed. The method involves the assessment of traffic noise levels and the measurement of the percentage of natural and contextual features using photographs of the scenes. Examples are taken from three amenity areas in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. Using published noise maps, sampling was taken at points in the three parks where visitors were likely to be found and where noise levels were likely to be highest and lowest. At these locations, predictions of the traffic noise levels were made and then the tranquillity rating and the mean value and distribution of ratings were compared. Recommendations for improving the perceived tranquillity are discussed.

In this paper we deal with the problem of the creation or closure of school classes from the perspective of a distance indicator seldom found in the literature: the time needed to travel by road from the family home to the training establishment. Unlike classical deterministic schemes, the originality of this work lies in the use of simulations which take into account the randomness of students' locations to provide an indication of the variability of the optimal positions for the classes' creation or closure solutions. We illustrate this with two case studies on postcompulsory education in France.

Research into shape grammar implementation has been largely concerned with rectilinear shapes and there has been limited research into implementation on shapes composed of curves. This reflects developments of the shape grammar formalism which has been defined largely according to straight lines, planes, and associated volumes. In this paper, implementation of shape grammars on curved shapes is examined using algorithms for shape operations on shapes composed of parametric curves. These algorithms have been implemented in a shape grammar interpreter for shapes composed of quadratic Bézier curves, which is illustrated via application of a shape grammar that generates Celtic knotwork patterns. Implementing shape grammars on shapes composed of Bézier curves highlights difficulties that arise when the shape grammar formalism is applied to curved shapes, and the paper concludes with a discussion that explores these difficulties and indicates potential implications for the shape grammar formalism.

Much has been written about ethnic residential segregation in urban areas, a great deal of it deploying single-index numbers to measure its intensity. These give very little detailed appreciation of the extent to which different ethnic groups live apart from each other, and where, within the city, generating the need for an approach that establishes the extent to which ethnic groups are concentrated in particular areas. This paper suggests that a combination of measures derived from local spatial statistics, which identify the geography of clustering, and a typology of residential areas, which describes the population composition of each area, provides much greater insight into the nature and extent of segregation/concentration. Data for London in 2001 illustrate the potential of this approach.

Disparities in accessibility to healthy food are a critical public-health concern. Poor access to reasonably priced, nutritious, and good-quality food may lead to poor diet and increase the risks of health problems such as obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. This research advances the popular two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method by incorporating a kernel density (KD) function to form the ‘KD2SFCA method’. The study applies the method to measure the spatial access to food stores in southwest Mississippi, and examines the interaction between the spatial access and nonspatial factors. The research shows that neighborhoods with higher scores of urban socioeconomic disadvantage actually have better spatial accessibility to food stores; but higher percentages of carless households and lower income in some neighborhoods may compromise overall accessibility. Neighborhoods with stronger cultural barriers tend to be associated with poorer spatial accessibility. The study clearly differentiates spatial and nonspatial factors in access inequalities, and thus helps policy makers to design corresponding remedial strategies.

Developments in transportation and information and communication technologies (ICTs) have facilitated the process labeled activity fragmentation. In this process, the weakened associations between activity, time, and place that ICTs made possible facilitate the disintegration of activities into smaller subtasks, which can then be performed at different times and at different locations. However, until now discussion of the fragmentation of activity hypothesis has been limited to the theoretical domain and largely absent from the empirical domain. In the study reported here we connect both domains by (1) developing a set of measures of activity fragmentation and (2) applying them to study the fragmentation of the activity of paid work using combined activity, travel, and communication diary data collected in the Netherlands in 2007 in order to assess the performance of these indicators. The results show that the indicators differentiate between the multiple facets of activity fragmentation (such as the number, dispersion, and configuration of fragments). The preliminary analyses also suggest that, although the temporal fragmentation of activities appears to be or to have become more common, spatial activity fragmentation is rather limited.

In this research we assessed the urban land conversion, and identified the factors responsible for the conversion, from 1995 to 2009 in Hangzhou, a large city located in the lower Yangtze River Delta of China. We mapped urban land from satellite images by using a hybrid approach of spectral mixture analysis, unsupervised classification, and expert rules. We employed binary logistic regression to model the probability of urban land conversion as a function of spatial independent variables. In recent years Hangzhou started its transformation from a compact, monocentric city to a polycentric city. We found that accessibility to the central business district, industrial centers, roads, Qiantang River, the amount of built-up area in the neighborhood, locations of markets, and spatial policies were the major determinants of Hangzhou's urban land conversion. Moreover, the availability of land in the neighborhood has become increasingly important in recent years. We identified several major institutional forces underlying Hangzhou's urban development: administrative annexation and development zones, the increasingly important role of the market, and the unique role of local government. The results from our research indicate the need for policies and plans that can better manage and reduce urban sprawl in Hangzhou.

Rural – urban inequalities in health and access to health care have long been of concern in health-policy formulation. Understanding these inequalities is critically important in efforts to plan a more effective geographical distribution of public health resources and programs. Socially and ethnically diverse populations are likely to exhibit different rural – urban gradients in health and well-being because of their varying experiences of place environments, yet little is known about the interplay between social and spatial inequalities. Using data from the Illinois State Cancer Registry, we investigate rural – urban inequalities in late-stage breast cancer diagnosis both for the overall population and for African-Americans, and the impacts of socioeconomic deprivation and spatial access to health care. Changes over time are analyzed from 1988–92 to 1998–2002, periods of heightened breast cancer awareness and increased access to screening. In both time periods, the risk of late-stage diagnosis is highest among patients living in the most urbanized areas, an indication of urban disadvantage. Multilevel modeling results indicate that rural – urban inequalities in risk are associated with differences in the demographic characteristics of area populations and differences in the social and spatial characteristics of the places in which they live. For African-American breast cancer patients, the rural – urban gradient is reversed, with higher risks among patients living outside the city of Chicago, suggesting a distinct set of health-related risks and place experiences that inhibit early breast cancer detection. Findings emphasize the need for combining spatial and social targeting in locating cancer prevention and treatment programs.

Researchers studying environmental perception and cognition in general, and human spatial ability in particular, have been using virtual reality as a promising tool. However, the virtual environments used in these studies showed variances in the levels of visual detail they offer. Yet, little is known about whether the level of visual detail in a virtual environment affects people's spatial performance. If the level of visual detail positively or adversely affects people's spatial performance, then researchers using virtual environments to investigate human spatial performance should account for the level of visual detail besides other factors of interest. This study aimed to compare people's spatial performance in two virtual environments that varied in their levels of visual detail (‘low’ and ‘high’). Part of the Ohio State University Campus, US was simulated with a three-dimensional computer-modeling program, GTK Radiant. QUAKE III ARENA, a real-time three-dimensional environment-generator game engine, produced perspective views through the simulation. Forty-nine students studying in Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey participated in the study. After a learning phase, participants were asked to (1) estimate the direction to two nonvisible signs, (2) estimate the straight-line and walking distances to two nonvisible signs, and (3) draw a sketch map of the environment. Results showed that the spatial knowledge acquired in the ‘low’ and ‘high’ visual detail virtual environments were similar. If people's spatial behavior does not change in virtual environments with ‘low’ and ‘high’ visual details, then researchers, designers, and planners could save time and energy in developing virtual environments to understand human behavior.