Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

A number of interchange heuristics are described for solving p-median location problems. The robustness of these algorithms is extensively evaluated in terms of optimality and mean percentage errors. The best of the proposed heuristics generated optimal solutions to 307 of 319 median problems solved drawn from six data sets.

Most assessments of the poor performance of regional planning agencies have focussed on the policy problems of putting development theory into practice. This paper looks instead at the institutional aspect. Abstracting from the diversity of policy contexts, it asks whether there are common political and administrative features in the process of organizational reform which first creates and then dissolves regional planning agencies. In a broad comparative review of published case studies an intrinsic dilemma of such agencies is identified. As planning units they trespass on the jurisdictions of established departments who in the long run have the proven ability to starve them of information, effectiveness, and credibility. Their only power-base is a regional political constituency; but developing this may prove equally fatal, for reforms which amplify interregional cleavages threaten the political integration of the state, making the political cost of regional planning unacceptably high to national governments.

In several papers, median and quartile locations are found to be attractive locations for public facilities which seek the minimization of total delivery costs. This conclusion is based on a restrictive set of assumptions regarding delivery cost function and demand distribution. The present paper derives necessary and sufficient conditions for median and quartile locations which minimize total delivery costs under general conditions regarding the cost function and demand distribution.

The planning process is modelled as an information processing system. The inputs to the system comprise observations of the state of the environment, and the outputs are goals and plans to guide actions in the environment. The processor consists of two interacting subsystems: the one carrying descriptions about material states is called the state space and the other holding information about decisions and values is called the decision space. The memory of the planning system stores its history: its ‘experiences’ both of its external and of its internal environments. The ‘facts’ which inform the planning system are represented as a relation between the state space and the decision space. Such a relation induces a pair of functions which is known to form a Galois connection between two sets. Compositions of these two functions are closure operators which define closure systems on the decision space and the state space, respectively. Each of these functions when restricted to the closure systems is an isomorphism. Isomorphic elements are paired together and the collection of such pairs forms a Galois lattice. A Galois lattice presents to the planners an overall view of the current ‘situation’ of the environment. Each element of the Galois lattice relates a set of ‘systems’ represented in the state space to a set of ‘values’ used to evaluate ‘systems’ in the decision space. The planning process is then viewed as a transformation of the Galois lattice which represents the current ‘situation’ to another Galois lattice which represents the desirable ‘situation’.

Local economic development has become a central concern of public policymakers. Urban, rural, and regional planners will encounter new opportunities to establish or restructure economic development planning in the years ahead. Local planners require an approach to planning for economic development that responds to the growing pressures on planning to achieve tangible results and accounts for the formidable political and financial constraints on public planning. The proposed approach—contingency planning—is presented in this paper. In the first section, contingency planning is placed in a planning theory context. In the body of the paper, the approach is described and critically discussed in the context of local economic development. After the conclusions, the practice of contingency planning is reviewed in the appendix to the paper.

The average or mean of the distances between pairs of vertices in a connected graph is a natural measure of the compactness of that graph. Using graphs to represent shapes, or corridor arrangements, we arrive, through a limiting process, at a concept for mean distance in shapes. This paper gives the mean distance for eight specific shapes and six infinite families of shapes.

A new approach is introduced for evaluating strategies for the safe disposal of high-level nuclear waste. Five strategies are considered, and by means of the effective method of ‘analytic hierarchy process’ these strategies are prioritized with respect to a set of tangible and intangible criteria. The results are compared with criteria adopted by the United States Department of Energy. The approach demonstrates that, when good judgments are used, one can solve complex decision problems in a simple way and make a rational decision in a short time.

This paper deals with the use of qualitative multicriteria analyses in physical planning. After a survey of various ‘soft’ multicriteria evaluation methods, a new technique—the so-called regime analysis—is presented. The use of this method is illustrated by means of a case study in urban housing and land-use policy in the Netherlands.

Mental, descriptive, or mathematical modelling processes are often used to predict or prescribe the future. The certainty of such projections can be improved by careful selection of the modelling criteria. Information theory is used to develop models that maximize the use of available information, which may include observed data, system constraints, and community objectives.

The use of game and information theory is explored via a combined land-use and transportation planning model to project the development of an urban system from the viewpoints of different groups and the decisions they control. This model can optimize future urban form by means of a weighted set of planning and behavioural goals. Variables include new activity, demolitions of existing activity, transport flows, and energy consumption.

Solutions are generated by optimizing the model under cooperative and noncooperative gaming conditions. The use of subsidies and surcharges to manipulate solutions towards a compromise or equilibrium is discussed.

In this paper attention will be focussed on the development of a new multicriteria evaluation approach for mixed ‘quantitative-qualitative’ data. First a brief overview is given of the ‘state of the art’ of multicriteria evaluation in urban and regional planning. In addition, a mixed data evaluation approach will be discussed, which includes three techniques which are all based on different interpretations of basic assumptions. Next it will be shown that there are some practical ways to deal with the weighting problem in evaluation. Finally, an illustration of the mixed data approach is provided by means of an empirical application to a housing allocation problem.