Design Concept for Assigning Urban Space

One of the major tasks in the urban planning process is the preparation of the land use plan. The utilization of intuition and subjectivity alone is insufficient for designing and evaluating alternative plans due to the increased complexity of the planning process. A concept is developed and translated into a formulation for aiding in this task. The concept considers the urban phenomenon as a system of human activities described in the form of an urban-wide schedule. Each activity requires a known amount of space and time in order to be undertaken by each individual member of the population. The aggregation of these activities with their required space-time contents subject to certain design constraints results in a land use plan. A number of alternative plans can be synthesized by exogenously varying one or more of the design constraints. The plans can be evaluated by comparing the graphical outputs and the utilization of the supplied structural space in terms of wasted or excessive supplied space or space-time content. A computer program is briefly described.