Compact Districts Research Articles

Not green belts but green wedges: the precarious relationship between city and country

This paper originated from a contribution to the Green Belt Seminar organised by the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland, September 1999 in Glasgow. It is based on the understanding that many of those concerned about the protection of Rural Britain are apprehensive of the expansive development of cities. City and country are seen to be in conflict, and the culprit is the city, the growth of which has to be contained with the help of green belts. This paper is about the relationship between city and country; it argues that there is indeed a conflict to do with urbanisation and decentralisation but that today the green belt is an inadequate concept to deal with these processes. The paper investigates first the origin and objectives of the green belt concept and its application up to the inter-war period and examines then the immediate post World War II plans for London and Glasgow in which the green belt concept played an important role. It concludes that the combination of urbanisation on the one hand and of decentralisation, for which the green belt concept was partially responsible, on the other have generated metropolitan and conurbation structures which today require a new planning and urban design approach. The final part of the paper discusses shortly the two concepts that are suggested: (a) the return to the compact city or (b) the acceptance and improvement of the decentralised structure of the city region. It suggests that the return to the compact city is economically unmanageable and socially unacceptable; the structure of the conurbation that emerged needs to be made to work and the concept that might help achieve this is based on compact neighbourhoods, districts and towns as micro-structural elements of the city region and a mutually supportive, i.e. symbiotic relationship between built-up areas and open land.

Choices in redistricting and electoral outcomes: the case of Mobile, Alabama

Evidence that multi-member electoral, districts hinder the election of minorities and that contests in these districts with racial bloc-voting prevent black electoral success has led to numerous legal attempts to declare this electoral system unconstitutional in the United States. A gradual substitution of multi-member by single-member districts in Northern states has been accompanied by use of the Voting Rights Act to end multi-member districting in the South. Mobile's electoral system has been the major test case over the past seven years. A recent judicial decision declaring the system unconstitutional will probably result in the imposition of single-member districts. All possible feasible solutions to the districting problem are computed and black electoral success computed for each outcome. The modal choice is clearly one black majority out of three districts. A choice of compact districts would increase black electoral prospects. Simulation of the residential distribution of the black population confirms that more segregated spatial arrangements provide greater electoral prospects and safer black seats. The evaluation of the impact of a change in electoral structure on the election of blacks within the framework of all possible outcomes to the districting problem is supported.

Method for Delineating Districts of Varying Shape

Numerous problems involve subdividing a region into a number of nonfragmented districts of specified size. A model for delineating such districts which vary in shape as well as size is described. The model is based on an iterative technique originally designed to construct compact districts and extended to the problems of generating wedge-shaped and elongated districts. The purpose in delineating these district shapes is to reflect the general orientation of a street network using only coordinate data describing demand locations rather than the actual distance between these points. This capability is useful for solving a variety of problems such as facility location, vehicle routing, and data clustering. Language: en