Econometric Model to Aid in Urban Planning Decisions

The paper describes an econometric model for use in a systems approach to urban planning, which has the capability of allocating activities of the localized type such as residential, various densities, industrial, commercial, agricultural, conservational, and recreational to potentially suitable spaces or zones in the environment, such that some measure of merit is maximized. Merit may include the costs of establishing, operating, and servicing the activities in the spaces and the costs of interactions between activities in spaces, such as those of traffic flows, road and rail networks, and economies or diseconomies of scale or proximity such as where two adjacent activities share the same service trunk, or complement each other economically. Mathematically, the model is a mathematical programming model. In general application, it is an allocation model, and particularly it is an urban planning aid. Physically, it is a computer program which includes both the model and its solution techniques.