Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science

The IOR school represents one of the two main streams of planning-methodological thinking in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper traces its development from its founding period (from its inception to the publication of Local Government and Strategic Choice) through the period during which its distinctive ‘strategic choice approach’ emerged and the work on ‘decision networks’ and ‘reticulists’ in planning was published to the present, in which the message has spread to a great number of foreign countries. Also, the paper discusses underlying methodological issues, trying to give a cogent formulation to its basic philosophy around a decision-centred view of planning. In conclusion, it is argued that the IOR school merits more attention than it actually received in the academic planning literature.

Though the concept of hierarchy has been used extensively in the siting of multilevel service systems, particular attention has not been paid by analysts to the full variety of ways in which locational goals of different service levels can be linked. Many past studies of locational hierarchies, for example, have been merely structural elaborations of common single-level location problems, with little thought given to the way in which service goals can or should be linked.

The purpose of this analysis is to develop multilevel siting models which incorporate spatial expressions of the functional interdependence between service levels. More importantly, however, this paper suggests the necessity for differentiating between two broad categories of hierarchical location systems, those which are technologically linked and those which are behaviorally linked. The basis of this differentiation is the type of spatial information which is communicated from one organization level to another. Furthermore, these two types of hierarchical systems are shown to have locational goal structures which can be exploited effectively in various planning scenarios.

This paper continues and completes a previous paper on the logic of decisionmaking. That paper considered the problem of speculations in decisionmaking discourse, and the metaproblem of how the procedures for making decisions are decided on. This paper extends the logic of the previous paper by considering decisions based on propositions which cannot be determined as true or false until some later time (speculations). This allows a definition of tactical decision, but in most cases begs the question of predicting when things will occur. This leads to a fundamental reconsideration of social time versus clock time in the description of social processes. Most of this paper is concerned with formulating a definition of social time in terms of the states of social systems. A Q-system is defined to be a hierarchical backcloth supporting traffic and supertraffic, concepts developed in the methodology of Q-analysis. State-changes can then define social time in the Q-system being planned and managed. Goals are defined as desirable states of the Q-system with strategic decisions involving the selection of Q-system trajectories expected to achieve goals. The relationship between social time and clock time is investigated and results in the concept of clock-time windows for social events. The sixteen guidelines for decisionmaking given in the previous paper require little amendment to apply to tactical and strategic decisionmaking, and they are extended by six more. The main conclusions of the two papers are that decisions are often bad because elementary rules of logic are violated, the social system being managed or planned is not well-defined, the hierarchy of authority is confused with the hierarchy of set-theoretic aggregation, and clock time is used inappropriately in planning social systems.

In the hope of improving the performance of public participation programs in practice, this paper applies a perspective drawn from the recent literature on implementation assessment to the design of such programs. Viewing participation not only as a way of structuring the relationship among groups, but as itself an object of varying interests and perceptions, the paper proposes the concept of a strategy of participation which implies the need to take into account the likely actions and points of view that the actors might take vis-à-vis the participation program. The paper presents a framework whereby alternative participatory strategies may be designed and methods selected. This framework is based on a set of six decision variables: the type of issue; goals and objectives; definition of the public; the power relationship; the stage in the planning process; and types of resources.

In this paper an elementary exploration is given of some of the features of Q-discrimination analysis, an adaptation by Johnson of Atkin's Q-analysis for use in clustering work. The method is summarised. It is shown how the performance of the method varies considerably, depending upon whether the data involved are integer or noninteger, over a given range of values, and on whether they are ordinal or interval. An ambiguity over the criteria for determining discrimination levels is also considered.

The utility of linear programming for land-use planning is firmly established. It allows realistic models of complex planning situations to be formulated and solved computationally. However, because many objectives are qualitative and conflicting and many of the constraints may not be clearly defined, the actual construction of a linear-programming formulation to model any specific land-use planning problem will not be easy. In addition, even on large computers real problems cannot in general be solved in an acceptable time. As a consequence, the availability and utility of the technique to people responsible for planning is restricted.

In fact, in many planning contexts, what the practitioner needs most is the ability to experiment with alternative plans cheaply and easily. This leads naturally to a search for ‘simplifications’ of the linear-programming formulations for land-use planning which yield effective and implementable systems for the practitioner and which allow him to experiment with realistic alternatives relevant to his planning responsibilities.

In this paper, we examine how the structure of a particular linear-programming formulation for land-use planning can be exploited to yield such simplifcations. On the one hand, it is shown that linear-programming formulations which allocate uses to the zones that make up a given planning region, can be classified as generalized upper bounding because of their special structure. On the other hand, this special structure is exploited to show how such linear-programming formulations can be solved more simply than by the direct use of the simplex method. In addition, it is used to motivate the use of the LUPLAN procedure and establish its relationship to linear-programming methods.

This paper considers the methodology of research into the nature of planning processes with particular reference to the use of the case study. The lack of systematic and critical examination of this matter has led generally to the persistence of a tradition of inductive research in which the case study is clearly the dominant method. The use of the case study is frequently justified by reference to its ability to investigate complex processes to the requisite level of detail; indeed, the case study itself, as a method, is often defined in such terms. An alternative characterization of the case study is proposed, based on a consideration of types of evidence. A review of the methodological literature reveals that the justification of the use of the case study purely by reference to the inherent nature of the subject matter is inadequate and that more fundamental matters should and implicitly do determine the choice of research method and the way in which it is used. These should be made explicit. This paper focuses, in particular, on two factors—the theory of knowledge that underpins research and the state of development of knowledge and theory in the field of research. These together, it is argued, define the research task and suggest the appropriate research method. A number of tasks are identified which challenge the current practice of inductive research and it is argued that the case study will play a different role in each.

The theory of shapes and the subshape relation is the same as the theory of individuals and the part relation.