Journal of Urban Planning and Development

There is growing momentum across many municipal jurisdictions in North America to reuse public and privately held vacant and underutilized urban land on a temporary to potentially permanent basis for community-centered and community-driven projects. Some uses include urban agriculture, parks and open spaces, and linear bikeway or walkway connections. Across many jurisdictions, limited resources have been allocated to inventorying and determining the valuation of these urban assets and their potential to contribute to a city’s green infrastructure capacity. The purpose of this research is to add an augmented capacity to an existing Microsoft Excel-based decision-support tool that captures the condition and location of vacant and underutilized land, calculates the relative suitability of the inventoried land for a suite of reuse strategies, and allows the user to evaluate location-allocation modeling scenarios. The additional capacity introduced herein provides users with the ability to produce a scaled design drawing for each allocated reuse strategy, and subsequently perform a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) based on user-defined design scenarios. The application of the design and costing tool, known as DECO, to a portion of an underutilized hydro utility corridor in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is presented and discussed to demonstrate the usability and inherent benefits of a graphically based LCCA approach. While developed as a decision-support tool for application by community groups, DECO has the potential to assist municipal planning staff and private and public land owners in clarifying the trade-offs between various design alternatives, given a specified life-cycle length. DECO is designed to allow the user to perform a series of “what-if” scenarios/sensitivity analyses to aid in well-informed green infrastructure investment decisions.

The simultaneous consideration of combined facility location and network design is an attractive empirical topic for locating public and private facilities and for reducing transportation costs. Moreover, applying a reliable facility location problem is one of the most effective ways to protect against occasional failures of the system, because of considering unexpected failures and possible customer reassignment when locating facilities. Accordingly, this study concerns a reliable combined facility location–network design problem regarding the investment budget constraint and proposes a mixed integer nonlinear programming formulation to model this constraint. The proposed model is linearized by suitable techniques. Also, a practical case study subject to sustainable design in urban health care development is presented in detail to illustrate the application of the proposed mathematical model. Finally, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to provide insights into the behavior of the proposed model in response to the changes of key parameters of the problem.

The motivation for this paper is to understand the value of urban agglomeration to rural economies in Indonesia. It has recently been argued that Indonesia has not leveraged urbanization for economic growth as effectively as peer countries such as China, India, Vietnam, and Thailand. This analysis is deepened by looking at within-country differences in the relationship between the growth of cities and the concomitant growth in rural economies located in proximity to these cities. Three sets of models are developed that examine growth over three relatively homogenous 4-year time periods. These are 1996–1999, the years roughly corresponding to the Asian financial crisis; 2001–2004, the years during which Indonesia recovered from the financial crisis, and also the first years of decentralized governance in the country; and 2004–2007, during which the country had regained precrisis gross domestic product (GDP) levels. Recognizing the strong possibility of feedback relationships between key variables, the final models treat economic growth as being jointly determined with population growth, human capital accumulation, and infrastructure legacy. The findings suggest that some of the most effective policy responses for increasing rural incomes could be seen in the increase of accessibility for rural areas to major metropolitan centers.

This paper develops a bilevel programming model to locate park-and-ride (P&R) facilities with the capability of capturing the interactions between decision makers and commuters. The upper-level model represents the authorities’ locating decision with the objective of maximizing the total social welfare (SW); the lower-level model is a stochastic user equilibrium one simulating commuters’ reactive behaviors, which in turn affects the P&R location decision at the upper level. The paper designs a scenario to compare the solutions under the optimization criterion of SW with that under two others: consumer surplus and producer surplus. Results indicate that adopting SW maximization as the optimization objective leads to a win-win outcome for both P&R service providers and users. The paper uses Chengdu City (in China) as a case study, and it is demonstrated that the proposed P&R locating framework is applicable to a large-scale network and compatible with the regional transportation planning procedure.

The present study investigates the relationship between land-use changes and soil capability in a polycentric region of northern Italy over two distinct periods: a dense and compact phase of urban growth observed after the World War II and encompassing three decades (1950s, 1960s, and 1970s) and the low-density dispersed expansion which took place in the area after the late 1970s. By comparing three high-resolution land-use maps for 1954, 1976, and 2008 to a soil-capability map, the study verifies (1) if urban expansion has consumed high-quality soils proportionally more than other soils, and (2) if urban diffusion observed after the late 1970s has consumed more high-quality soils than compact growth did in the aftermath of World War II. The urban areas (increasing by 0.2% per year from 2.5% in 1954 to 14.5% in 2008) consumed proportionally more high-quality than low-quality soils at the expenses of cropland and natural areas. Moreover, dispersed, low-density settlements have developed on land with higher soil capability more frequently than dense urban settlements. The comparison with a monocentric urban region (Rome, Italy) indicates that per-capita land consumption and high-quality soil conversion to impervious land are higher in the investigated northern Italy area. The relevance of soil capability as a target variable for policies mitigating high-quality soil consumption in polycentric regions was discussed.

This paper explores a unique case of a community-initiated urban regeneration through the adaptive reuse of historic buildings in the Tianzifang district in Shanghai. The adaptive reuse of historic buildings has increasingly become a successful approach which contributes to the concept of sustainable development in many rapidly developing, densely populated Asian cities, such as Shanghai. This study aims to develop a theoretical framework for sustainable community-initiated adaptive reuse through the mixed method of qualitative and quantitative analysis. Data were collected from a case study, in-depth interviews, and surveys. This study also intends to demonstrate the positive link between community-initiated adaptive reuse and sustainable development. This study adopts a four spheres framework of sustainability comprising the social, economic, environmental, and political-institutional concerns to examine the transformation process in Tianzifang. This paper illustrates that a community-initiated adaptive reuse of the historic district has enhanced social networks and conserved an original way of life. As the problems and issues of Tianzifang are very typical of the historic cores of many developing countries, this finding can be applied as a generic theoretical framework to assess and study similar areas in other developing countries.

This paper examines the causal connections between land use and household driving distance in the Houston-Galveston metropolitan area by introducing the directed acyclic graphs. It is found that population density and roadway design measure have direct causal relationships with total household driving distance. In terms of elasticity estimates of driving distance with respect to land-use measures, the impacts of land use on household driving distance are found to be overrated in the conventional regression analyses compared with the results based on the directed acyclic graphs. Urban development and design strategies can play a significant role in reducing household driving distance, which then helps moderate air pollution and climate change.