Journal of Urban Planning and Development

Pedestrians’ emotional satisfaction when using an urban sidewalk landscapes depends on the sidewalk design elements and component ratios. It is therefore important for the design of a sidewalk to reflect pedestrians’ emotional perceptions through affective engineering and design. In this study, sidewalk preference is surveyed based on principles of affective engineering and is modeled in order to understand the relationships between the design elements and the component ratios in a sidewalk landscape. Through comparisons, sidewalk design criteria are presented with the aim of developing a comfortable and pleasant sidewalk landscape. Sidewalk design elements include sidewalk width, shrub width, tree height, and tree width. Also, component area ratios for greenery, sky, roadway, sidewalk, and building are used to define the design criteria. This paper is for a Korean case study that is subject to Korean perceptions on sidewalk landscape. The research shows that it is crucial to consider affective engineering in order to design a comfortable and pleasant sidewalk landscape.

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of students’ activity characteristics and travel patterns based on the 2001 North Carolina State University Student Activity Travel Survey. Results show that undergraduate students and on-campus residents are engaged in more activities than graduate students and off-campus students. Graduate students are more likely to engage in class and work activity in the afternoon than in the morning. There is no statistically significant difference between student groups in terms of the proportion of students involved in a certain activity at a certain hour of the day. Instead, the types of activities are different across all 24 h of a day. The insights gained from this study will serve as the basis of an activity-based university travel demand model for North Carolina State University.

With rising expenses and scrutiny of storm-water programs, managers need information on costs and benefits to make rational funding decisions. Most, however, lack this basic information. This study sought to identify and quantify the economic and ecological costs of storm-water-related damage and storm-water-management programs, and to understand relationships between management activities and damage reduction. Data were collected from published agency budgets, damage assessments, and structured interviews with storm-water managers. We focused on a single region, the Puget Sound region of Washington State, where storm-water issues abound and annual storm-water expenditures average about $100/capita. Benefits of storm-water management, primarily avoided damages, were presumed to exceed expenditures, but most jurisdictions have not systematically evaluated program effectiveness. Moreover, ecological damage from storm water is significant but commonly neglected in funding decisions. Results indicate the need to (1) evaluate the effectiveness of storm-water-management expenditures; (2) consider nonmonetary and ecological impacts in management and funding decisions; (3) explore preventive measures that can be less costly than remediation; and (4) increase public awareness of storm-water problems to support objective funding decisions.

Government agencies and other organizations responsive to a diverse constituency face enormous challenges in identifying priority sites for relocation, expansion, or new development. Of paramount importance is establishing transparent decision processes that reach accountable, defensible, and wise outcomes. Unfortunately, documented examples of successful approaches to evaluation, prioritization, and site selection are scarce. The purpose of this paper is to both offer a descriptive case study and an intellectually rigorous, fundamentally practical “best practice” approach for identifying priority sites. By employing value-focused thinking and decision analysis techniques to a complex site selection problem, we present a way to address common challenges such as potential technical and nontechnical knowledge conflicts, distinguishing between “facts” and “values,” incorporating uncertainties, generating criteria weights, making trade-offs and building consensus across interests. Our approach is contextualized in a Canadian government case study of relocating a $300 million dollar facility.

Historical patterns and driving forces of land-use change were investigated in Shanghai under the background of drastic socioeconomic transition in China. Differing from the previous researches, this paper highlights the investigation of not only the socioeconomic factors driving urban area growth, but also the physical elements affecting urban land’s spatial distribution through remote sensing and multivariable regression methods. The results indicate that land-use changes have been occurring at an accelerating pace in Shanghai over the past two decades, and are characterized by a massive increase of urban land and a loss of croplands. The growth in urban land use has primarily been driven by population, economy, and transportation, and its spatial distribution has mainly been influenced by accessibility to the transport network and the city center, together with the constraints of existing land-use patterns. The implications for policy are that improvements are needed in the efficient use of resources and the layout of a more adequate transport network; simple restrictions on the migration to cities are not a long-term solution. The conservation and exploitation of agricultural land, as well as the promotion of urban green spaces, are also crucial instruments for sustainable city development.