Journal of Urban Planning and Development

The city of Irbid, Jordon, is divided into 17 zones to examine the accessibility of the locations of the public facilities by zone. The educational, health, postal, mosque, public park, fire, police, library and bank services in Irbid are analyzed, as is the accessibility to public transport, to know how good the location of these facilities is to the public. A descriptive measure, rather than a quantitative one, is used in the analysis. A circle of the maximum walking distance is drawn around each facility representing the service area for that facility, and zones ranging from completely served by these facilities to completely unserved are described. The analysis shows that the central zones had redundant services for many uses, while other zones were partially served or even unserved. The public transport network compensated for the majority of the deficiencies in accessibility over the zones. The analysis shows that the availability of good services tends to vary inversely with the needs of the population served.

A geographic information system (GIS) can aid the solution of engineering problems that involve spatial and nonspatial data components. The potential of GIS for urban planning and development applications has not been realized. One such application is the use of GIS for collecting, analyzing, and presenting data used by the construction industry for urban planning and development. Implementation of a GIS can integrate the facility delivery process that involves planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance. Complete, accurate, and consistent information facilitates efficient design and improves decision making. The results are the abilities to plan and develop urban areas more efficiently, increase coordination of construction projects with the surrounding urban area, and reduce fragmentation in the construction industry. This paper presents an overview of the facility delivery process and describes its integration through a GIS framework that allows for sharing of construction data and urban planning information among the participants in the process. Such a GIS is comprised of complex software components that must interact through shared data. To build a GIS for facility delivery, a number of organizational, software, and hardware problems must be addressed. Implementation issues are discussed in this paper including technological, organizational, social, and economic impediments that require future research.

The land‐allocation problem is one of selecting, from a finite number of candidate parcels, that set of parcels that best meets the needs of a specific land‐use objective. This research extends land‐allocation modeling methodologies to address problems requiring allocation of parcels to multiple areas with different shapes. The approach relies on the use of shape constraints within the context of discrete multiobjective programming models set on a regular, or uniform grid structure. Several model formulations are presented including a nonlinear discrete optimization model that addresses an explicit districting problem. A heuristic algorithm is developed to generate a solution for this problem, and computational performance of this algorithm is presented and discussed.