Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

In the field of public library study, travel costs incurred when returning books is an important issue for the spatial distribution of users, as well as the load necessary in the process of book borrowing. In recent years, the Free Return System, which is a subsystem of Library Services, has been developed so that users can return books to any library. In this paper, a model for describing the users' choice behaviour of facilities is constructed, and a method for evaluating travel costs accrued when travelling from home to facilities is proposed. The proposed model is applied to actual data of the choice behaviour of users of public libraries. The results of numerical analyses show that the Free Return System can reduce travel costs by 20% on average, and this value is equivalent to a growth of approximately 8% in the user base.

Debates on urban tourism have been coupled with a widespread discourse on ‘placelessness’, ‘loss of identity’, and ‘standardization’ related to the modernist ideology of planning. In this respect, utilizing this historic urban fabric has become important as a means of recreating an urban image. Ironically, efforts to avoid standardization are caught in another trap of sameness and blandness, because a very similar vocabulary is used in the ability of those tourist-historic places to meet the expectations of the universal tourist industry. In this context, we analyzed the recent efforts to integrate an inner-city area, Ankara Citadel and its vicinity, focusing on the changing identity owing to the introduction of income-generating and tourist-attraction facilities. The nature and consequences of this transformation have been investigated in terms of the issues of preservation practice, economic feasibility, public interest, and its ethics and legitimacy.

A new approach to button design has recently been proposed that uses natural segments, instead of even intervals, on the weight value range in determining the number of tabs that should be incorporated in a button system and the value each button carries. Button systems so designed do not have the problems of redundancy and underrepresentation that are common to the conventionally designed button systems. Presently limited to the map overlays that involve only two parent maps, this approach is extended to the case of three parent maps in this paper.

In 1985, the Thatcher Conservative Government granted the newly deregulated mobile-phone companies permitted development rights to erect telecommunications masts up to 15 m in height. This dilution of planning control led to a proliferation of insensitively sited mobile-phone masts across the United Kingdom, prompting large-scale public hostility. After the publication of the Stewart Report in 2000, which pointed to the possible risks to people's psychological health from antennae radiation emissions, the newly devolved planning administrations of the United Kingdom conducted reviews of these permitted development rights. The author examines these reviews and the decisions that emerged from them. It is argued that the differentiated approach to mobile phone mast control that has resulted represents an early and important departure from what was, arguably, a unified planning system within the United Kingdom.

Visual impact assessment using GIS (geographical information system) based viewshed mapping is commonly employed on major projects. However, there is typically little analysis of the possible range of impact based on the size of the introduced landscape element, its contrast with the surroundings, or the effect of typical levels of atmospheric scattering on the perceived contrast. A landscape element which is increasingly the subject of aesthetic scrutiny and visual analysis is the wind-energy turbine or—when installed in large numbers—the wind farm. I take the wind turbine as my subject partly because of its recent significance and also because, as a moving element, it is a special case. I report an Internet-based experiment to determine the relative perceived size of a turbine, image analysis to determine its typical contrast level, and the effect of atmospheric scattering on this contrast. With these three factors and equations derived in an earlier study, estimates are made for the probability of turbine detection, recognition, and visual impact at distances up to 30 km.

The scheduling of daily activities requires decisions to be made on which activities to conduct, where, when, for how long, and the transport mode involved. In a common conceptualization of the decision process, a multitude of time frames is involved. Longer term decisions determine the allocation of time across main activity categories as well as the profiling of institutionalized activities such as work and some leisure activities. The authors introduce a conceptual framework for modeling the formation of activity agendas that represents the results of such longer term decisions. The framework identifies the elementary decisions and arranges these decisions in a hierarchy. In the proposed system, the decisions are handled by a set of relatively autonomous interacting agents.

Information and communication technology (ICT) is widely accepted as a potentially favourable set of instruments, which may improve the welfare and competitiveness of nations and cities. Nowadays, both public and private actors aim to exploit the expected benefits of ICT developments. The authors seek to investigate the potential of ICT use at an urban level and, in particular, to shed more light on various factors that influence urban ICT policies in the public domain. First, a conceptual framework, designed to improve understanding of the driving forces of urban ICT policies, is outlined. It focuses on the way decisionmakers perceive their city, and shape their opinions about ICT; it addresses in particular the way these decisionmakers evaluate the importance of ICT for their city. Next, interviews with urban decisionmakers in different European cities in three countries (Austria, Spain, and the Netherlands) are used to analyse the complex relationship between perceived urban characteristics (for example, nature of problems and urban image), personal attitudes towards ICT, administrative features of the cities concerned, and perceptions of the relevance of ICT to the cities. The authors' main focus is on the identification of a possible systematic relationship between the aforementioned explanatory factors and urban decisionmakers' attitudes towards ICT policies. Understanding the decisionmakers' perceptions is an important step towards grasping the nature and substance of the policy itself, and may explain some of the variance among different cities. Because the ‘urban ICT’ discourse is still relatively new, an open-interview method is used to capture a variety of different views and perceptions on ICT and on the information age in the city. With the aid of qualitative content analysis, the interview results are transformed into a more systematic and comparable form. The results suggest that even interviewees from the same city may have a different understanding of their urban reality whereas, on the other hand, cities with different characteristics may appear to suffer from similar problems. Moreover, the authors found a wide range of attitudes toward ICT and its expected social impacts, although most of the interviewees appeared to be more sceptical than had been expected. The authors identified a clear need for a more thorough investigation of background factors and, therefore an approach originating from the field of artificial intelligence—rough-set analysis—was deployed to offer a more rigorous analysis. This approach helped in the characterisation and understanding of perceptions and attitudes regarding urban policies, problems, and images.

Previous research had introduced a genetic algorithm procedure for creating alternative policy options for municipal solid waste (MSW) management planning. These alternatives were generated during the design phase of planning, with the final policy determined in subsequent comparative analysis. However, because of the many uncertain factors that exist within MSW systems, this earlier procedure cannot be applied to situations containing such stochastic components. In this paper, it is shown that a generic algorithm approach can be simultaneously combined with simulation to incorporate these stochastic elements in the policy option generation phase; thereby permitting uncertainty to be directly integrated into the construction of the alternatives during the planning-design phase. This procedure is applied to case data taken from the Regional Municipality of Hamilton–Wentworth in the Province of Ontario, Canada. It can be shown that this procedure extends the earlier approach and provides many practical planning benefits for problems when uncertain conditions are present.

A shape-pattern schema is an organized body of knowledge about spatial relationships between shapes which describes the patterns, syntactic structure, and the characteristics of shape patterns. In this paper we show how such schema can be represented by means of chain models. We also show the advantage of this approach (relative to the previously suggested tree representations) for patterns with certain natural symmetries. To do this, we describe an example, and discuss its implementation by means of the application procedural interface of our system. Because the chain-model formulation subsumes the tree representation as a special case, the chain-model approach can also be used wherever the tree representation would be appropriate.