Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

Planning stands at a crossroads. Much of the idealism and momentum for the pursuit of the public good has been lost in the painful evaluation of its failure to produce a better environment and to advance the good society. In this note it is argued that much can still be done to make planning more effective though the development of better methods in terms of structuring goals, outlining resources and constraints which bound possible plans, finding possible actions which generate good plans, predicting their outcomes, and finding good plans within all these limits including those of time and political tolerance.

The California Urban Futures model is the first in a new generation of metropolitan simulation models which replicate realistic urban growth patterns and the impacts of development policy at various levels of government. It projects population from the ‘bottom-up’, it allocates growth to sites based on development profitability, it realistically embodies the role of accessibility in the development process, and it is operated through the medium of geographic information systems. This paper is an explanation of the rationale of the model and the way it has been built in terms of its formal structure, its databases, its decision rules which reflect the development process, and its application to the San Francisco Bay Area where it has been used to evaluate the impact of a diverse set of development policies. The paper concludes with an agenda for further model development.

Techniques for seismic risk assessment have improved rapidly in the past decade. Much more is known about how different types of structures respond to an earthquake. To make assessments of seismic risk, this earthquake hazard information must be combined with an inventory of buildings by structure type. The cost of obtaining such inventory information presents a key stumbling block to implementing risk assessment techniques for large urban areas. Structure inventories based on field surveys are too expensive and become outdated as soon as they are completed. No single secondary data source contains the detailed structural information required by today's risk assessment techniques. A knowledge-based system is described that makes inferences about structure types based on secondary data. Existing land use, structure age, size, number of stories, and improvement are used to classify buildings by structure type. The knowledge-based system uses a set of rules to make inferences about structure type based on these characteristics and thus creates new data not available from secondary sources.

The use of the SETIA project monitoring system that has been developed by the Federal Government of Malaysia is analysed with a view to identifying some general lessons for planners and policymakers involved in the development of decision support systems in both more developed and less developed countries. An important feature of the SETIA system is the wide range of users in central planning agencies, spending ministries, and state-level agencies that is involved and the extent to which the system makes use of well-established monitoring and evaluation procedures.

Most of the research and published literature deals almost entirely with the effects of planned intervention. This is remarkable because since the late 1970s emphasis has shifted from plan to planning process. A planning process cannot be assessed in terms of the traditional measures of effectiveness. The purpose of this study is to describe a methodology for assessing a planning process by making use of variables related to normative, methodological, and institutional dimensions of planning with a view to initiate a comparative examination of methodologies for assessing a planning process as well as to develop more integrated thinking with regard to such an assessment.

A shape grammar of the spatial design of linear Ndebele homesteads is presented. The results suggest that this analytical technique provides a useful means for relating spatial layout to social ideas in a class of architectural designs.

The authors generate alternative location-covering scenarios for retail outlet networks by using a programming model which guarantees the spatial market ‘adequacy’ of individual facility sites. The notion of relative spatial efficiency is then used to evaluate these scenarios and to develop information constructs which support many of the managerial decisions necessary for the appropriate structuring of such networks.

The geography of crime risk is a major concern of the public and of policymakers, but it is notoriously difficult to ‘map’ convincingly in Britain. Along with some unresolved issues of interpretation, there is a major problem of inadequate information. The official crime statistics are shown here to be inadequate when assessed against the three key criteria which are identified as the prerequisites before any data source can provide valid comparisons of crime rates in local urban and rural areas. The authors argue that the main issue for local analysis is crime risk, and that this is also the concern of insurance companies. Consequently, insurance rates—which are based on detailed analysis of past crime incidence—provide a plausible proxy data source on crime risk. This suggestion is explored empirically, with the sample region of North West England and postcode district insurance rate values for both 1988 and 1991.