Community Analysis and Planning Techniques


Book Description

This book introduces and describes four techniques, which are at the core of professional practice and education: The first technique , curve-fitting/extrapolation, projects an area' s population, employment, or other characteristics by identifying and extending historical trends. The second technique, the cohort-component technique, projects an area' s population by dividing it into a uniform set of population subgroups or cohorts and applying the three components of population change-mortality, fertility, and migration-to each cohort. The third technique, the economic base technique, projects local economic change by dividing a local economy into basic and nonbasic sectors and by focusing analytic attention on the basic sector. The fourth technique, the shift-share technique, projects an area's economic activity by relating it to the activity of the state or nation in which it is located.




Planning Support Methods


Book Description

Planning Support Methods offers the only practical guide to the key methods of urban and regional planning. The authors apply and critically assess the most important methods for demographic and economic analysis and projection and land suitability analysis, providing an essential resource for practicing planners and planning students alike. For helpful tools from the author including Excel workbooks, visit https://planningsupport.org/tools/. For resources including PowerPoint presentations and supplemental readings, visit https://planningsupport.org/resources/.




Planning Support Systems


Book Description

With planning support software, citizen planners can move buildings from block to block, tear them down, build complete subdivisions, run new highways in and around town, analyze any number of scenarios, and see with their own eyes the consequences of each action. This reference offers new possibilities and discusses the most important aspects of computer-aided land-use planning.




Planning Support Systems Best Practice and New Methods


Book Description

Planning Support Systems: Retrospect and Prospect It has been nearly twenty years since the term ‘planning support systems’ (PSS) first appeared in an article by Britton Harris (Harris 1989) and more than ten years since the concept was more broadly introduced in the academic literature (Harris and Batty 1993; Batty 1995; Klosterman 1997). As a result, the publication of a new book on PSS provides an excellent opportunity to assess past progress in the field and speculate on future developments. PSS have clearly become very popular in the academic world. This is the fourth edited book devoted to the topic following Brail and Klosterman (2001), Geertman and Stillwell (2003), and a third by Brail (2008). Papers devoted to PSS have been published in the leading planning journals and the topic has become a regular theme at academic conferences around the world; it has even spawned intellectual o- spring such as spatial planning and decision support systems (SPDSS) and public participation planning support systems (PP-PSS). However, as Geertman and Stillwell point out in their introductory chapter, the experience with PSS in the world of professional practice has been disappointing. A substantial number of PSS have been developed but most of them are academic p- totypes or ‘one off’ professional applications that have not been adopted elsewhere.




Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development


Book Description

This book collects a selection of the best articles presented at the CUPUM (Computers in Urban Planning and Urban Management) conference, held in the second week of July 2013 in Utrecht, the Netherlands. The articles included were selected by external reviewers using a double blind process.




Basic Quantitative Research Methods for Urban Planners


Book Description

In most planning practice and research, planners work with quantitative data. By summarizing, analyzing, and presenting data, planners create stories and narratives that explain various planning issues. Particularly, in the era of big data and data mining, there is a stronger demand in planning practice and research to increase capacity for data-driven storytelling. Basic Quantitative Research Methods for Urban Planners provides readers with comprehensive knowledge and hands-on techniques for a variety of quantitative research studies, from descriptive statistics to commonly used inferential statistics. It covers statistical methods from chi-square through logistic regression and also quasi-experimental studies. At the same time, the book provides fundamental knowledge about research in general, such as planning data sources and uses, conceptual frameworks, and technical writing. The book presents relatively complex material in the simplest and clearest way possible, and through the use of real world planning examples, makes the theoretical and abstract content of each chapter as tangible as possible. It will be invaluable to students and novice researchers from planning programs, intermediate researchers who want to branch out methodologically, practicing planners who need to conduct basic analyses with planning data, and anyone who consumes the research of others and needs to judge its validity and reliability.




Quality Planning and Assurance


Book Description

"Quality planning has been a fundamental industrial practice for several decades, yet there are few comprehensive quality planning textbooks dedicated to the understanding of this subject at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In the quality field, professionals often consider Toyota as a role model for best practices. While one can learn Toyota quality for its principles, its specific practices are not necessarily applicable for every situation. In The Toyota Way to Service Excellence, Dr. Liker and Ross stated, "the Toyota Way training was designed to teach principles rather than specific methodology" (p.32). Similarly, this book focuses on the fundamental principles of quality planning, and extrapolates on their applications in various industries throughout each chapter. For current and future quality professionals, you can start learning these principles, with supporting application examples in this book, and later apply them towards your unique applications. Like one of my students said, "What I enjoyed most about this course was taking the information learned in this course and being able to utilize it within the industry that I currently work in.""--




Capacity Planning for Web Services


Book Description

MenascT (computer science, George Mason U.) and Almeida (computer science, U. of Minas Gerais, Brazil) provide a quantitative analysis of Web service availability and a framework for understanding and planning Web services. They discuss benchmarking, load testing, workload forecasting, and performan




Landscape Planning with Ecosystem Services


Book Description

Human well-being depends in many ways on maintaining the stock of natural resources which deliver the services from which human’s benefit. However, these resources and flows of services are increasingly threatened by unsustainable and competing land uses. Particular threats exist to those public goods whose values are not well-represented in markets or whose deterioration will only affect future generations. As market forces alone are not sufficient, effective means for local and regional planning are needed in order to safeguard scarce natural resources, coordinate land uses and create sustainable landscape structures. This book argues that a solution to such challenges in Europe can be found by merging the landscape planning tradition with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making. The book is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.




The Development of an Integrated Planning and Decision Support System (IPDSS) for Land Consolidation


Book Description

This book provides an extensive review of three interrelated issues: land fragmentation, land consolidation, and land reallocation, and it presents in detail the theoretical background, design, development and application of a prototype integrated planning and decision support system for land consolidation. The system integrates geographic information systems (GIS) and artificial intelligence techniques including expert systems (ES) and genetic algorithms (GAs) with multi-criteria decision methods (MCDM), both multi-attribute (MADM) and multi-objective (MODM). The system is based on four modules for measuring land fragmentation; automatically generating alternative land redistribution plans; evaluating those plans; and automatically designing the land partitioning plan. The presented research provides a new scientific framework for land-consolidation planning both in terms of theory and practice, by presenting new findings and by developing better tools and methods embedded in an integrated GIS environment. It also makes a valuable contribution to the fields of GIS and spatial planning, as it provides new methods and ideas that could be applied to improve the former for the benefit of the latter in the context of planning support systems. “From the 1960s, ambitious research activities set out to observe regarding IT-support of the complex and time consuming redistribution processes within land consolidation – without any practically relevant results, until now. This scientific work is likely to close that gap. This distinguished publication is highly recommended to land consolidation planning experts, researchers and academics alike.” – Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joachim Thomas, Münster/ Germany "Planning support systems take new scientific tools based on GIS, optimisation and simulation and use these to inform the process of plan-making and policy. This book is one of the first to show how this can be consistently done and it is a triumph of demonstrating how such systems can be made operational. Essential reading for planners, analysts and GI scientists." – Prof. Michael Batty, University College London