Journal of Urban Planning and Development

With the accelerated worldwide urbanization process, land-use zoning has been playing an increasingly important role in urban planning and development. Ahead of detailed planning, regional land-use zoning provides significant guidance to subsequent design and constructions, especially for large conurbations in less developed regions. Foshan, lies in the south of China with an area of $\mathrm{3,813.64}{\text{km}}^2$ and a population of about 3.36 million, is a typical Chinese city with a relatively well-developed industry. This paper studies how land-use zoning diagnose the present urban land use, optimize the landscape pattern, as well as improves urban development sustainability. On the basis of integrated evaluation of ecological capacity, ecological suitability, ecosystem services, and ecological footprint, this paper designs the three-level land-use zoning for Foshan. Four areas, 11 sections, and 78 cells have been designed within four main classifications of function zones: ecological conservation area, ecologically sensitive area, ecological construction area, and ecological regulation area. Accordingly the overall land-use pattern of Foshan has been clearly improved in terms of urban sprawl control, landscape pattern optimization, industrial layout redesign, and ecological conservation.

Despite the historic origin of Greater Amman Municipality (GAM), it is considered a modern city. The development of GAM through the 19th and 20th century was dramatic and massive. Since the beginning of the 21st century and precisely since 2002, GAM started a large property development project that forms the cornerstone of GAM development strategy. GAM’s situation is a mixture between state control and economic liberalism in which urban development is determined by the planning vision of attracting foreign investment and reducing restrictions to free enterprise. GAM presents an example of global economic forces that occur in a developed society. This paper examines the development of GAM, focusing on its major urban problems and suggesting some solutions. A review of the recent megaprojects now taking place in GAM is carried out indicating the urgent need for a specialized committee to lay down a comprehensive metropolitan plan for GAM for at least the next 10 years. The last comprehensive plan in 1987 cannot continue to serve GAM’s recent overwhelming urban property development.

The application of expert systems has emerged as a cost efficient tool in civil engineering over the past decades. Use of these tools for decision making in land use will be outlined in this paper. In this study, soil-structure interaction (SSI) is discussed by using expert systems, namely, neural network (NN) approaches. This method provides a new point of view for evaluations of SSI and land use. Data from 58 local sites in California, namely, earthquake, structure, and soil property data, are used. In the expert system approach, two NN architectures are used: the back propagation NN architecture and the general regression NN (GRNN) architecture. There are 21 parameters considered as input and 4 output parameters. The four output parameters chosen are soil-to-structure rigidity ratio, period lengthening, foundation damping, and whether SSI effects can be neglected or not. The results show that the GRNN approaches are more useful and powerful for evaluation of SSI and land use.

The questions connected to the urban analysis, which study aspects that are not univocally translatable into objective facts, regard in particular three appearances: the scientificity, and so the objectivity of the results and the repeatability of the method in different contexts; the updating capability, and so the possibility to add new data, to modify the existing ones and to obtain other results; and the times, and so the sustainable possibility of using the results respecting the evolution of a sustainable programming and town planning process. To answer to those questions the method of analysis PlaceMaker and the relative software, actually under development, have the following main characteristics: flexibility, facility and rapidity of use, strong graphical impact, and indexing of the results. PlaceMaker is a method for analyzing the contemporary urban landscape designed to identify the elements that do not feature in traditional mapping and that constitute the contemporary identity of the places, representing them in a complex map that renders those places intelligible. Starting from those premises, the aim of this work, carried out in the framework of a Convention between Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche and Dipartimento di Progettazione Urbana e di Urbanistica–Università di Napoli Federico II, is that of illustrating the method of analysis of PlaceMaker and investigating on the construction of complex indices starting from data and symbols related to the place identity. In order to support the study and the project of the sustainable urban landscapes, the symbols created for the elaboration of the complex map, final result of the analysis, are translated by the PlaceMaker software into numerical indices. Thanks to those characteristics, the prime users of PlaceMaker are the following: urban planners, administrators, citizen, and all people involved in the sustainable city construction. To complete the work, suitable case studies are presented.

Urban land structure, layout, and land-use mode influence regional sustainable development greatly. However, planners usually cannot work perfectly because of insufficient environmental information for decision making. In recent years, with urban geographic information system (GIS) development many cities have already built up integrated urban information platform to support regional digitalization process. By using spatial data mining technology urban planning related knowledge can be discovered form GIS database to help planners and decision makers in their work. Through analyzing of Chinese cities’ construction mode and developing trend, this paper illustrates how to build up an urban planning spatial decision support system (UPSDSS) based on exploratory spatial data analysis technology support. By spatial data mining form GIS database, UPSDSS can provide related knowledge for urban planning decision making with inference engines (rule inference and case inference) support. As an important part of the research, UPSDSS had been used in urban planning management of Harbin city in China. With hidden information discovered by UPSDSS Harbin planners work easily and effectively. Three cases demonstrate how UPSDSS helped Harbin city in policy making in macroscopic urban expending planning, underground exploitation scheme making, and local land structure changing.

This study began by raising the question of whether new urbanization could modify social relationships in traditional contexts and makes it accepting the cultural growth along with any urban development or, just can threaten the local values and local heritage. To solve the problems posed by globalization and new urban planning, here we try to suggest one solution: public participation or democracy in urban planning; but this time under new definitions. “To be [global] is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, and everything we are. [Global] environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, [globalization] can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity. To be [global] is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’” This is the problem of our era: To melt in what means the entire world, under the pressing of global power. How we can remain ourselves while melting in and joining to the global society.

Biophilia is the idea that claims on the dependency of human identity on the relationship with the nature. The idea has been developed in recent years and can consist of nine tendencies addressed in this paper. The study involves the understanding of biophilia values with respect to people’s views regarding to the urban park specifications. The people points of view about trees are investigated in the urban parks of Bradford (U.K.) through structured interviews and completing a designed questionnaire. The results are analyzed according to the biophilia tendencies and a quantitative analysis is undertaken to explore the popular attitudes considering ethnic groups (Asian and White British). In addition, the results are considered as the input to the proposed analytical hierarchical process model, which is developed to assist urban managers as a helping tool to understand people’s view of their surrounding environment in a structured way.

Following the 1999 Marmara earthquakes, urban regeneration has gained particular importance in redevelopment of housing areas particularly in historical districts of Istanbul. Local governments, upon new roles and responsibilities regarding postdisaster conditions as well as the changing global trends, called for innovative planning approaches which involve the community. In this respect, some questions are raised in the planning agenda: While performing the new roles, what kind of institutional changes should local governments experience? How should local community be involved in this process? The paper considers the conditions of spatial and community change in realizing urban regeneration as a collaborative action through the case study of Matra—Regeneration of Istanbul Metropolitan Area (Matra REGIMA) project which highlights the fundamental capacity building requirement for both local government practitioners and the community in order to achieve the necessary actions. Consequently, this study highlights the strengths and limitations of the capacity building program applied in Zeytinburnu toward implications for future collaborative actions within urban regeneration schemes.