Ideation and evaluation methods applied to land-use planning

Abstract

The selection of any land-use plan requires judgement by the decisionmaker(s). The role of the analyst is to improve the information available to the decisionmaker(s). If the planning problem is represented by a mathematical model, then methods of generating alternative solutions by manipulating the model, that is, ideation methods, are desirable tools for the analyst. In this paper, a vector-space approach is used to develop and unify various ideation methods within a formal mathematical framework that provides a geometric interpretation of the ideation process. A realistic land-use planning example is used to illustrate the concepts, and hierarchical clustering methods are used to examine the differences between alternative land-use plans.