Urban Planning Disciplines Research Articles

Land Use Planning and its Potential to Reduce Hazard Vulnerability: Current Practices and Future Possibilities

The concentration of people and infrastructure along the nation's coastline has increased our vulnerability to severe coastal storms and other natural hazards, as evidenced by the substantial social, economic and environmental impacts of recent hurricanes. Competing policy objectives and stakeholder interests pose challenges to planners' and public officials' attempts to increase resilience using land development-based approaches. This paper describes theses issues for researchers outside the urban and regional planning discipline. It presents the typical approaches to hazard mitigation and the primary land-use tools used to manage coastal development. It strives to inspire interdisciplinary visioning of sustainable coastal development patterns needed to advance resiliency.

Bases conceituais para a pesquisa: infra-estrutura urbana e qualidade ambiental e paisagística

This paper gathers conceptual fundamentals learnt during the graduate and specialization programs at the University of São Paulo. Since the author started these studies in 1987, she has had the opportunity to absorb the experience of outstanding researchers and professors who advised her research and conceptual formulations. In the Landscape and Environment field - originally part of FAUUSP's Urban and Regional Planning discipline - Prof. Miranda Martinelli Magnoli and Prof. Silvio Soares Macedo advised her research for the Master's Degree from 1987 to 1993. Later Prof. Murillo Marx advised her doctoral thesis on History and Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism from 1997 to 2002. All of them played an instrumental role in establishing important parameters and methodological references for the author's research. The reviewed and updated concepts summarized here validate the line of research started by the author in 2003 at Universidade São Judas Tadeu, where she has taught since 1991.

Integrating Risk Reduction, Urban Planning and Housing: Lessons From El Salvador

Increasingly, attention has been given to the need to mainstream risk reduction in development work in order to reduce the vulnerability of the urban poor. Using El Salvador as a case study, the paper analyses the mainstreaming process in the developmental disciplines of urban planning and housing. The overall aim is to identify how the existing separation between risk reduction, urban planning and housing can be overcome and integration achieved. Since Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and especially after the 2001 earthquakes, not only relief and development organisations, but also social housing organisations have initiated a shift to include risk reduction in their fields of action in order to address the underlying causes of urban vulnerability. The factors that triggered the process were: 1) the negative experiences of organisations with non-integral projects, 2) the organisations' increased emphasis on working with municipal development, 3) political changes at national level, and more importantly, 4) the introduction and promotion of the concept of risk reduction by international and regional aid organisations. However, required additional knowledge and institutional capacities were mainly built up independently and internally by each organisation, and not through the creation of co-operative partnerships, thus duplicating efforts and increasing ineffective competition. Whilst positive experience has been gained through the implementation of more integral projects, the creation of adequate operational, organisational, institutional and legal frameworks is still in its initial stage. Unfortunately, four years after the 2001 earthquakes, emergency relief funding for post-disaster risk reduction is coming to an end without the allocation of resources for following up and consolidating the initial process. Based on the findings, an integral model is proposed which shows how mainstreaming risk reduction in urban planning and housing could be dealt with in such a way that it becomes more integrated, inclusive and sustainable within a developmental context.

Active living research and the urban design, planning, and transportation disciplines

Active living research and the urban design, planning, and transportation disciplines

The Geography of Cyberspace

The Geography of Cyberspace

Who Will Build the Vietnamese City in the 21st Century? Globalization and Tradition in Land and Housing in Hanoi

Abstract Vietnam is in transition from a command economy to a market economy. Changes in investment patterns, different systems of urban management and images and fashions by the media, rapidly replace the former socialist cities' aesthetics and structures. This paper presents an analysis of processes and patterns of change in Hanoi, capital of Vietnam. The case of Hanoi is chosen to highlight how these new conditions are affected by a mixture of local and global processes, largely outside control of conventional urban planning disciplines. This research attempts to search the theoretical basis to form new ways of dynamic strategic planning in which the urban planning practise is not a producer of static plans but is used as a strategic tool able to recognize the many mixed global & local processes active in a specific environment, the ones shaping the actual physical city. The research is searching for tools that respond to the dynamic processes of rapid urbanization due to globalization and industrializ...

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Socioeconomic Characteristics and Their Relationship to Fire Incidence: A Review of the Literature

This article presents a literature review of the socioeconomic modeling of fire incidence, with an emphasis on urban residential fires. The development and history of socioeconomic models of fire incidence are reviewed from the perspectives of ecology and location economics within the urban planning discipline, which encompasses sociological, economic, epidemiological, and interdisciplinary approaches. The predominant methodology used is a thematic type of qualitative analysis, and detailed information on variables selected and results are offered where appropriate. The article closes with suggestions for further research.

Interfacing GIS With Models for Urban Planning and Analysis

This paper describes a possible approach in integrating models for urban planning and related disciplines, with a Geographic Information System (GIS). The proposed approach is compared with two traditional approaches in integrating models with a GIS or a mapping software. As, an illustrative example, a simple gravity model implemented in C++, was selected. The aimof the exercise is to integrate the model with a commercial GIS or mapping package such as MapInfo. This goal was achieved by establishing a inter-process communication (IPC) link between the model and MapInfo, where themodel acts as the client and MapInfo as the server. This approach differs from traditional methods that suggest either extending the existing implementation of the model or re-implementing the model within a commercial GIS or mapping software. (a) For the covering entry of this conference, see IRRD abstract no 861539.

Race, Poverty and the Law

Low-income people of color who live in inner-cities lack access to adequate goods and services, schools, houses and jobs. In order to develop strategies to end segregation, legal practitioners and researchers use legal and non-legal sources. This list describes resources and organizations in the legal areas of civil rights, housing discrimination, discrimination in education, and employment discrimination. Non-legal resources draw from sociology, education, banking, social work, history, African-American Studies, demography, industrial relations, statistics, urban planning, and other disciplines. Segregation based on race and income continues, but a multidisciplinary approach may lead to effective strategies for combatting it.

The Application of Legibility Techniques to Enhance Information Visualizations

This paper shows how previous research into navigation through urban environments, which has emerged from the discipline of urban planning, can be adapted to enhance the design of information visualizations. The paper draws on Kevin Lynch's seminal work on the legibility of urban landscapes in order to propose a set of general techniques which can be applied to the task of information visualization. It describes a specific instantiation of these techniques called LEADS, a legibility system which post-processes the output of a range of existing visualization systems in order to enhance their legibility. The paper provides four examples of the application of LEADS to different information visualizations. Following this, it discusses experimental work, the conclusions of which provide some tentative support for the likely success of this approach. The outcomes of this work are both a recognition of the important relationship between the disciplines of urban planning and the design of information visualizations as well as more concrete algorithms to be used by the designers of such visualizations.

Using Culture and Communications Theory in Postmodern Urban Planning

Building on the thesis that humans impute meaning to constructed urban places, the authors define three historical stages of created urban place from the perspective of those building and living in cities in the Western tradition. They contend that with postmodern conditions the mode of social organization is changing and that, as a result of this change, a qualitatively new form of space has developed. This space is a mental space called the space of flows or cyberspace. The authors argue that in this new stage, urban planning must be performed in a framework that is both ecological and cybernetic. The essay is an argument for the nexus of the disciplines of urban planning and communication studies.