1,721,010 research outputs found
Using MapTable® to learn about sustainable development
No full textSustainable urban development is a critical issue in the Netherlands. The country is densely populated, which causes conflicts between environmental concerns and spatial development. Environmental policy integration is proposed as a way to improve the integration of environmental values into spatial planning with the help of learning processes. This chapter evaluates the extent to which the combination of a map-based touch table and an area-specific environmental profile are of added value to environmental policy integration. The case study is the application of the map-based touch table, called MapTable® for the development of a sustainable neighborhood in the region of Utrecht, the Netherlands. It was found that MapTable® facilitates learning processes by providing a platform for communication among stakeholders from different backgrounds. Nonetheless, it must be ensured that all stakeholders are equally included, and that the process suits the application of a map-based touch table in combination with an area-specific environmental profile
Introduction to ‘Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development’
No full textPlanning Support Systems (PSS) are geo-information-technology-based instruments that are dedicated to supporting those involved in planning in the performance of their specific tasks (Batty 1995; Klosterman 1997). The term PSS appeared on the planning scene in the mid-1980s thanks to its progenitor, Britton Harris, although the concept of building instruments dedicated to the support of planning activities dates back much further. In this first introductory chapter a brief demarcation of the concept of PSS will be provided, besides a concise overview of the content of this book on "Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development"
The SID Creator: A Visual Approach for Integrating Sensors with the Sensor Web
Get PDFThis paper describes the Sensor Interface Descriptor (SID) model and focuses on presenting and evaluating the SID creator, a visual approach to create instances of the SID model. Those SID instances comprise the knowledge required to integrate a sensor with the Sensor Web. This integration is done by an SID interpreter which uses an SID instance to translate between a sensor protocol and the Sensor Web protocols. An SID instance, designed for a particular sensor type, can be reused in multiple applications and can be shared among user communities. The SID creator enables users to describe the interface, commands and metadata of their sensors. In a user study, we evaluated the simplification of the sensor integration process through the SID concept. The study incorporated four user groups, ranging from high school students to expert users, who were challenged to integrate weather station sensors with the Sensor Web by utilizing the SID creator. While the common approaches of integrating such sensors with the Sensor Web involve manual coding and extensive adaptation efforts, this new visual approach significantly simplifies the integration process
Smart Urban Governance: Governing Cities in the “Smart” Era
No full textAccording to many scholars, building a smart city requires “smart” governance approaches, including new government structures, new relationships, and new processes. Here, smart governance can be generally understood as the capacity to apply digital technologies and intelligent activities in the processing of information and in decision-making and creating innovative institutional arrangements. It requires reshaping the role of governments, citizens, and other social actors, innovating organizational and decision-making processes, and improving the use of existing and emerging information technologies to conceptualize and frame a new generation of e-participation. In practice, however, neither the development nor the advancement of smart governance is satisfactory. The implementation of smart governance in practice is mainly characterized by a corporate-led, technocratic way of governing cities. This raises the question how a transformative smart governance of cities can be conceptualized and developed and what role ICT should play in the transformative smart governance of cities.
More recent studies show that the long experience of planning support ICT studies in handling technological innovations is able to offer potential insights into the innovative development and application of new ICTs in the field of the smart city and its subfield of smart governance. The key statement is that planning support systems (PSS) innovations and applications in urban planning should be closely related to the needs of users and planning practices. Then, authors from urban studies claim that there is a need to link smart city governance to the “urban issue,” since knowledge cannot be simply gained through data-mining and ICT-based urban analytics. Then, the urban issue is produced by urban social processes which indicates a set of social relationships. For urban governance to become smart, the development of functionalities, applications, and ICTs in augmenting urban governance should be closely linked to urban issues (e.g., political, social, cultural, historical, and spatial issues) and support a smart urban governance in the service of local communities and ordinary people, rather than a small group of highly skilled experts. To respond to this, I argue that the mentioned perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at smart urban governance. Thus, this dissertation specifically focuses on how smart urban governance approach can be conceptualized and what role ICT could play in such governance.
The conceptualization of smart urban governance responds to arguments that alternatives to corporate-led, technocratic smart governance should have “a solid epistemological and ontological understanding of the urban … and be more aware of how urban problems and their proposed smart solution are socially constructed” (Verrest and Pfeffer, 2019). It explores the role of the situated agents and their contribution to promoting a demand-driven smart governance. It also highlights a sociotechnical approach to ICT development and implementation. In other words, it is necessary to understand why smart technologies are designed, developed, and implemented as an appropriate answer to the perceived and constructed problems. Finally, smart urban governance highlights the importance of contextual factors for finding solutions to urban challenges
Planning Support Systems for Long-Term Climate Resilience: A Critical Review
No full textAs climate change is becoming a reality, there is an increasing demand to improve urban resilience. Planning Support Systems (PSS) enable climate-informed planning. However, previous research confirms difficulties in the uptake of PSS due to their resource-intensive nature and lack of awareness of their usefulness. This chapter aims to make a headway in understanding research priorities and gaps that need to be addressed for PSS to address climate resilience in the long run. To this end, we review the emerging body of knowledge in academia and practice, by conducting a text-mining analysis of academic (n = 36,405) and non-academic (practice) (n = 86) literature on urban planning and climate resilience. We extract trends on climate pressures, infrastructure drivers, and planning responses. A key finding from academic literature is that long-term planning continues to be limited to a few fixed scenarios and places a strong focus on single sector strategies. Practice documents continue to be designed to inform high-level policies, but not spatial plans that require integrated thinking. Our analysis concludes with a research agenda for improving PSS to (1) identify and integrate the full range of variables in the long-term; (2) support selection of appropriate planning responses across multiple infrastructure systems; and (3) improve flexibility in planning by a deeper understanding of temporal aspects such as planning timeframes
Accessibility and socio-spatial inequalities between locals and migrants in Xiamen city, China
No full textThrough in-depth empirical analysis, this study aims to understand the differences in the spatial relationships of employment, housing, and public services among different socioeconomic groups and the resulting socioeconomic inequalities.
Our study confirms that the spatial reorganization caused by housing and economic reforms further marginalized weaker socioeconomic groups. This is primarily reflected in their choice of housing location and tenure types. Our results show that the majority of the locals are homeowners, while the majority of the migrants are renters. For the locals, low-income groups are in a disadvantaged position when competing for educational resources and the surrounding environment. For the migrants, the amount of rent and proximity to work are the most important factors in their housing choice, and the accessibility of public service facilities around the housing has no obvious impact on the rental market than on the owner-occupied market.
On the one hand, disparities in housing choices among distinct socioeconomic groups lead to different degrees of accessibility to public services. Regardless of the inner city and outer city, areas with a high proportion of migrant renters who do not own cars tend to have lower accessibility to public services than those with a lower proportion of such groups. Similarly, areas with a high proportion of local populations with low education and poor skills tend to have less access to public services than those with a low proportion of such groups, which is mainly reflected in outer cities. These results indicate that disadvantaged groups experience a greater level of inequity.
On the other hand, differences in the spatial distribution of employment and residence among distinct socioeconomic groups result in varying degrees of job accessibility and spatial mismatch. In general, it shows that the level of spatial mismatch is more substantial for blue-collar and pink-collar locals than for respectively blue-collar and pink-collar migrants. This is mainly because migrant renters are much more flexible than local homeowners and can easily adjust their living place to accommodate changes in the working place. However, the commuting time of local workers is shorter than that of migrant workers due to the differences in travel modes.
In addition to potential accessibility, this study also investigates actual commuting activities at the individual level. The micro-level analysis shows that the commuting distance of migrant workers is shorter than that of local workers, which once again confirms that the migrant workers experience a lower level of spatial mismatch than the local workers. This research extends the current comparative study of commuting patterns of local and non-local workers by distinguishing their occupations and confirms that there is considerable heterogeneity in commuting time and distance between different types of workers.
In the context of China, this study delivers two policy implications. On the one hand, newly built areas should maximize the provision of housing, jobs, and public services within walking distance of transit stations. On the other hand, the study calls for extending the coverage of low-rent housing to the migrant population
Smart Governance in Practice
No full textThis dissertation focuses on smart governance - technology-enabled cooperation between the local state and citizens to collectively act in public matters. Smart governance has become a popular concept over the past decade - its promise to address the societal challenges rapidly accruing in cities is both praised and criticized. Despite this increasing interest, the theoretical and empirical understanding of this concept is inadequate, making it difficult to ascertain whether, and if so, how smart governance is actually part of today’s urban reality. The aim of this dissertation was to add to this understanding by means of an empirical study with a focus on two major aspects: 1) citizen engagement manifesting in the urban system and in bottom-up initiatives, 2) the contextual influence shaping smart governance practices. For this purpose, diverse cases in cities from Brazil, Scotland, and the Netherlands were explored
Usefulness of Planning Support Systems : Conceptual perspectives and practitioners' experiences
No full textThis dissertation starts by observing (Chapter 1) that the question of supporting
planning and policy making with dedicated information is an old and important
one. In the end of the 1980s a research field emerges dedicated
to specifically cater instruments to the needs of practitioners, so called
Planning Support Systems (PSS). PSS can be defined as ‘geo-information based
instruments that incorporate a suite of components that collectively
support some parts of a unique professional planning task’. PSS is often
software, which supports understanding and evaluating planning decisions.
While the instrumental characteristics of PSS have improved significantly over
the last two decades, this has not resulted in intensive usage in planning and
policy practice. Earlier research has shed light on the bottlenecks preventing
this higher frequency of usage. It has hardly been studied, however, what it
means for planning practice if a PSS is indeed used.
How can the usefulness of Planning Support Systems for planning practice be
conceptualized and how do practitioners experience this?
The following six chapters answer different aspects of this research question.
Chapter 2 has a chiefly conceptual focus. It emphasizes the collaborative and
communicative nature of contemporary planning, whereas PSS traditionally
come from a scientific-analytical approach to planning. This chapter argues
that a better role of PSS can particularly be found in a careful conceptualization
of knowledge.The role of PSS in planning particularly lies in gathering and testing the knowledge claims that are brought forward by different stakeholders.
Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 report about the added value of PSS applications as
perceived by practitioners. A conceptual framework is developed, in which
added value is measured on the individual, group and outcome level. In a Group Decision Room
workshop particularly communication and collaboration are emphasized
as important added values of PSS.The questionnaires indicate that
particularly learning is as an important
added value of PSS.
Chapter 5 focuses in detail on interdisciplinary learning (part of of learning
about others), which is conceived as ‘frame reflection’ by stakeholders three disciplinary frames about planning and PSS: an analytic frame, a design frame, and a negotiation frame. The two case studies reveal that a PSS can both have a positive and a negative effect on interdisciplinary communication.
Chapter 6 and Chapter 7 focus on the planning tasks that are supported by the
application of the PSS. In both chapters the concept of task-technology fit is
used, which refers to the extent to which the support capabilities of a PSS (i.e.
the ‘technology’) influence the extent to which planning tasks are successfully
conducted. The findings indicate that a PSS is particularly useful when applied selectively.
In the conclusion (Chapter 8) the overarching finding is discussed that PSS are to be particularly useful when applied selectively. Facilitation could play a key role in achieving this.
In future research it is important that the perspective of
practitioners is kept in mind, particularly since the recent attention for smart cities and big data tends to have a chiefly technological focus
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