Journal of Urban Planning and Development

The present paper analyzes and compares the current urban green space planning and management experiences of 23 European cities in order to understand the critical factors behind their success and/or failure and to obtain strategic and policy relevant information on the key features of urban green provisions and maintenance. The results of our comparative analysis show that—despite a variety in urban green space policies in cities in Europe—the critical success conditions in planning and management of urban green spaces have emerged in four factors/attributes: (1) the share of green space in urban land use; (2) the changes in these shares over time; (3) the intensity of involvement of the city administration; and (4) the degree of citizen participation. The comparative evaluation of our analysis also shows some interesting results in terms of geographical and regional characteristics in the success level. We can say that three geographical regions, northern Europe, southern Europe, and eastern Europe, with different success levels and characteristics, have emerged in the green picture of Europe.

Different transport stakeholders have different needs for transport infrastructure and services. Meeting the needs of stakeholders implies a tradeoff of benefits and costs between supply and demand and creates issues of transport diversity. However, the literature has largely ignored these issues. This study aims to provide a framework evaluating transport diversity to promote quality of life. Transport diversity is defined as the satisfied level of stakeholder needs in this study and measured as the gap between the expected goal and present values of stakeholder needs in the form of the Shannon–Weaver index. Transport diversity can assess whether the level to which important needs are satisfied equitably, and monitor whether the transportation system is moving toward sustainability via confirming the targets and the basic level of quality of life. This study hopes that the conceptual framework developed can assist decision makers in understanding the relationship between transport diversity and sustainability, and provide a new assessment method for improvements in quality of life.

The aims of this paper are to empirically test and evaluate methods for describing intraurban polycentricity, and to evaluate the polycentric development with respect to the regional development plan of the Office of Urban and Regional Transportation in 2001. The study area is Stockholm County and the time period investigated is 1991–2004. Three dimensions of polycentricity are analyzed: urban nuclei size relations, spatial distribution of urban nuclei, and potential interaction (accessibility). According to the methods’ various qualifications in describing polycentric forms it is proposed here that a combination of methods is preferable for this subject. The polycentric structure exposes an increasing and considerable concentration of urban resources to the major urban nuclei. This concentration is combined with an increased spatial dispersal of the urban nuclei. In relative terms, the accessibility has decreased concerning the accessibility by public transportation modes and increased (workspace) or remained on almost the same level (residential space) by car transportation mode. Thus, the urban structural change in the Stockholm region corresponds to the political guidelines. In spite of this, by the increase in relative accessibility by car and decrease in the relative accessibility by public transportation modes the goal concerning higher share in public transports may not be possible to fulfill.

This descriptive case study examines the influence of the land-use type on the level of use of greenways for physical activity, and is intended to inform the construction or expansion of multi-use greenway systems. Greenway use data were collected through direct observation, making multiple passes over two city greenways and recording the location of users with a Global Positioning System device. The distribution of uses was then examined with land-use data using geographic information systems to determine if use was heaviest on segments of the greenway adjacent to areas with distinct land-use characteristics. The study reveals that use is heaviest on sections of the greenway that intersect parks and on greenway segments in downtown areas where there is a concentration of commercial land use. Use is also significant on segments that connect parks to the downtown when these two land uses are separated by relatively short distances.

Evacuation management for large crowds after events involves a number of processes and factors with socioeconomic and environmental implications. These processes and factors, as well as their interactions, are associated with a variety of uncertainties. In this study, an inexact fuzzy robust programming model for evacuation management (IFR-EM) has been developed for supporting the management of event-related evacuation under uncertainty. Through the proposed method, parameters presented as interval numbers and/or fuzzy boundary intervals are acceptable as uncertain inputs, such that the uncertainties can be directly communicated into the optimization process. Programming robustness can thus be highly enhanced. The proposed method is applied to a case study and then solved through an interactive method. A number of decision alternatives could be directly generated based on results of the model, which might be favored by decision makers because of the increased flexibility and applicability. Results of the IFR-EM model can reflect a compromise between optimality and stability of the study system, and are also useful for gaining insights into trade-offs among objectives of system efficiency, environmental protection, and economic cost. Also, the results suggest that the proposed IFR-EM method can explicitly address complexities and uncertainties in evacuation management systems and is applicable to practical evacuation problems.