Journal of Urban Planning and Development

With the rapid growth of the economy and urbanization in China, the challenges facing cities with respect to urban function, urban fabric, and living environment are enormous. Urban renewal projects aim to address these problems and lead to lasting improvements in physical, social, economic, and environmental aspects of urban built-up areas. The complexity and uncertainty of urban renewal projects face a high possibility of failure. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design a systematic procedure to detect the critical success factors (CSFs) of urban renewal projects and reveal the influencing mechanism among the success factors in China. To this end, 24 final success factors were identified from a literature review, followed by the application of the Delphi method and the t-test model. Subsequently, the fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) method was utilized to ascertain five CSFs so that project promoters and managers could effectively monitor the performance of urban renewal projects. Furthermore, corresponding countermeasures were provided to be adopted for further urban renewal projects with the three critical influence paths. Although project promoters, land ownership, and stakeholder groups vary significantly among different countries, the useful insights and research foundations from this study are equally applicable to countries other than China.

Given the background of rural revitalization, it is considered crucial for solving various village problems caused by fast urbanization, including the underuse of rural land resources and inappropriate spatial construction. The essential causes behind these problems come from the social-ecological system vulnerability (SESV) of villages. This paper aims to propose an evaluation index system for rural SESV that focuses on the rural planning strategies for local decision makers with regard to the vulnerability principal components in the Northeast China Plain. Taking 30 villages as evaluation samples, this paper constructed an SESV index and established a model for measuring the vulnerability degrees. Further, principal component analysis was used to analyze the primary principal components of rural SESV dimensions, exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity, helping in SESV-type classification and efficient planning strategies and policies correspondingly. Results obtained revealed that 56.7% of the sample villages have high or serious vulnerability, which is mainly affected by the impact of land use changes and population changes. Thirty villages were divided into three SESV types, with a ratio of 11:18:5. This research can provide a decision-making basis to reduce rural SESV and improve the human settlement planning.

While infill development is widely accepted by cities as an alternative to urban sprawl, a very dearth of research has attempted to measure infill development and identify contributing factors to infill development. Filling this research gap, this paper models residential infill development in the City of Los Angeles by employing five machine learning (ML) algorithms. This paper attempts to identify the best-performing ML algorithms by comparing the performance of the ML algorithms. Of the five ML algorithms tested, the random forest (RF) and k-nearest neighbor (kNN) algorithms are selected as the best-performing algorithms. The RF algorithm ranks independent variables from most to least important. Overall, the ranks suggested that residential infill development in the City of Los Angeles is significantly influenced by the physical conditions of property and neighborhood rather than socioeconomic characteristics. Diverse land uses, good housing mixes, and rail transit accessibility also, importantly, contributed to the infill development. This finding suggests that the city’s planning efforts, such as the promotion of accessory dwelling unit (ADU) development and the expansion of rail transit, can create a virtuous circle for sustainable urban development.

In recent decades, transit equity has become a recurrent topic within the domain of sustainable transportation, where accessibility is a crucial indicator. However, the measurement of accessibility and equity in existing studies is usually based on the route with the shortest travel time, whereas multiple travel routes and corresponding travel costs remain unexamined. Taking the ground access to Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) as an example, this study aims to fill the previous research gaps by examining the equity of accessibility by public transport simultaneously considering different sets of route options and corresponding total travel costs. These routes have either the shortest travel time or the maximum time-saving benefit–monetary cost ratio. Results reveal spatial variation in the total travel cost, which reflects considerable horizontal inequity. The results, however, indicate that vertical equity exists because the total travel cost is positively correlated with median income level across different locations. In addition, the route that provides a reasonable benefit–cost ratio further improves the equity in accessibility to HKIA. The study illustrates the significance of simultaneous consideration of total travel costs and multiple routes in the assessment of accessibility equity. It also provides transferrable methods for evaluating transit equity.

In recent years, the planning idea of denser road networks and smaller blocks has received particular interest from planners and researchers. However, what is the impact of road network density on the efficiency of automobile traffic? Does a denser road network operate better? To address these questions, we develop an analytical approach taking the influence of intersection delay into account in this research. It is proved that there exists an optimal road network density that maximizes the average travel speed and travel production simultaneously under a given vehicle accumulation. When determining the reasonable road network density, the optimal density under peak-hour vehicle accumulation can be an important reference but not the final choice. If the peak-hour traffic fluctuates acutely, a denser road network should be considered for providing higher reliability. If the peak period is quite short, a sparser road network may be a better choice for providing higher travel speed as well as higher travel production during off-peak periods.

Agglomeration of producer services forms the basis for regional industrial layout optimization, whereas urban association adequately describes the spatial pattern of producer services agglomeration. Based on the relationship between the agglomeration of businesses around strongly related industries, this study constructs a multilayer network model to investigate the urban interlocking of agglomerated producer services in China. By analyzing urban hierarchy, configuration, directionality, clustering, and intermediation, we identify key cities, an urban agglomeration, and the characteristics and evolution of urban association patterns under industrial agglomeration. From 2005 to 2015, cities with agglomerated producer service economies expanded from central and eastern regions into the surrounding areas. We identify core producer services cities and major urban agglomerations in a region and define the radial configuration that forms around core cities. This reveals the weak agglomeration characteristics of surrounding areas and the national distribution of resources. Simultaneously, major urban agglomerations have factors that circulate between regions and are integrated into the overall interlocking network. Our results offer guidance for industrial layouts and further industrial development.

The last mile between metro stations and commuters’ homes or workplaces has become one of key topics in relation to metro ridership in megacities where more than 10 million people live. Although the public bicycle is widely believed to be one of new ways to solve the last-mile problem, the determinants of the use of public bicycles by commuters as a feeder mode have been scarcely discussed in the literature. This paper aims to contribute to this topic by using Beijing as a case study. Based on a travel survey among public bike users in Beijing, this study applied the binary logit model and cluster analysis to explore the determinants of public bike use around metro stations. The paper focused on three independent variables: route environment, socioeconomic factors, and travel distance. The results showed that middle-aged and medium-income commuters are more likely to use public bicycles as a feeder mode for metro transport. The built environment had significant effects on public bike use. Most of the cyclists preferred cycling routes with high directness, while high-income and high-education cyclists viewed comfort and safety of the trip as priority factors. Most trips were within 2 km, and a longer travel distance was significantly related to a higher possibility of public bicycle use. The findings and conclusions can enhance our existing understanding of public bike use as a feeder mode to solve the last mile problem and provide new evidence for policymaking on promoting public bikes in megacities.

The American Automobile Association (AAA) conducted a 1-year pilot study of running a self-driving shuttle bus in the old downtown of Las Vegas between November 1, 2017, and October 31, 2018. Using the 3-year business license data in the City of Las Vegas—1 year before, 1 year during, and 1 year after the operation, this study conducts a generalized linear mixed-effect regression analysis to examine whether, and if so, how much operation of the autonomous shuttle bus affected change in the growth of active businesses during its 1-year operation. After controlling for each Census block group’s demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, the results show that Census block groups located close to the autonomous shuttle bus stops resulted in a significant increase in the number of active businesses during its operation. We also found significant positive impacts of employment mix, education level, and residents’ accessibility to jobs on the number of active business licenses. These results suggest that, like other fixed-guideway public transit, operation and dissemination of autonomous shuttle bus services can play a positive role in enhancing the level of business activities, particularly in old and declined downtown areas. This study ends with implications of the autonomous shuttle bus in terms of economic development.

Urban plans that will shape the city's future should include sustainable transportation systems so that it becomes a livable city. Today, delimiting individual transportation and increasing the share of mass transit play an essential role in planning a sustainable urban transportation system. Several practices can be utilized for attracting private car users into public transportation. Among these practices, park-and-ride application precedes because it provides significant benefits in sustainable transport. Therefore, city planning should be considered together with parking lot areas. In this evaluation, it would be more appropriate to use multiple-criteria decision methods (MCDMs) such as analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and analytical network process (ANP) instead of cost–benefit analysis (CBA) that focuses only on costs and revenues. Therefore, it is not accurate to evaluate the park-and-ride application in cities only according to the monetized criteria by CBA, because there are severe problems in monetizing negativities such as traffic congestion, loss of time, and harmful environmental effects arising from the city's structure. For this reason, it was thought that it would be more accurate to make a multiple-criteria evaluation with methods such as AHP and ANP for the park-and-ride application. In addition, using multiple criteria decision-making methods will positively increase the effects of urban planning on the city. In this direction, a new approach to the subject is presented in our study. In this study, the park-and-ride system and other applicable scenarios have been evaluated in the city of Eskisehir with both AHP and ANP methods by taking expert views. In this respect, the study shows differences from the previous studies on this subject. The alternatives evaluated in the study comprise the Protection of the Current Situation, the Introduction of Only Restrictive Factors, and the Park-and-Ride Implementation. As a result, in applying both methods, the overall relative priority values of alternatives were calculated and found to be the highest in the case of Park-and-Ride Implementation. Therefore, the park-and-ride application came forward in both methods. In this regard, the results obtained are consistent. From this study, it was determined that the park-and-ride application ensured a clear superiority compared with other alternatives. This study provides a general framework for the park-and-ride application in medium-sized cities whose centers are congested and attract many passengers in developing countries. Although it seems that an application has been made for the city of Eskisehir, the study also contains general characteristics.

This study aims to visualize the future housing dispersal of expatriates, based on the predicted urban growth in emerging cities. Generalized adversarial networks (GANs) will be utilized to predict the future urban growth of Doha Metropolitan emerging city. The housing dispersal of expatriates will be visualized on the predicted urban growth map to investigate housing preferences, which will be based on Gordon’s theory. This study will prove the feasibility of a process approach when practicing the management of urban growth in emerging cities worldwide. It could be a robust solution for the worsening imbalance in the urban morphology of metropolitan cities. The findings of the broad-spectrum housing dispersal guidelines could benefit the policymakers and planners for the realities of spatial patterns and future urban growth.

Job–housing balance has been widely studied as a means to promote sustainable urban planning. Many studies have been conducted to explore how to improve the job–housing balance, but there is inadequate evidence of the effects of metro transit. This paper constructs a difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the impacts of the presence of metro transit on the job–housing balance. Considering the distribution of metro stations varies between different regions, a continuous DID model is further built to analyze the impacts of metro service intensity (measured by the number of metro stations). The results show that metro transit is negatively associated with job–housing balance, and such an association increases with each year since the metro operation. We find that the job–housing relationship of the districts where the metro passes and its adjacent areas are both impacted by metro transit. The operation of the metro is not conducive to achieve job–housing balance. This research provides an important reference for making supportive policies to improve the regional job–housing balance and to facilitate sustainable urban development.

Shared parking, as an important means of revitalizing static traffic facilities, has received widespread attention from all walks of life. At the microlevel, this paper analyzes a total of more than one million parking data points (including the license plate information of each vehicle, the time of entering and leaving the parking lot, the parking time and the parking fee, and so on) in Chongqing, studies the change cycle and change characteristics of the data, and draws the conclusion that the traffic volumes of office buildings and shopping malls are significantly different on weekdays and weekends. Based on the performed analysis, this paper establishes a supply-and-demand-based appreciation model to project the impact of the implementation of shared parking on real estate value appreciation. The calculation results show that the implementation of shared parking can increase the value of the parking lot studied in the example by 17% of its original value. Although the model established in this article is aimed at the sharing of parking spaces between an office building in the city’s central business district and the surrounding shopping mall, it can also be extended and applied to the evaluation of parking space sharing between general buildings. Overall, this paper provides effective methods into revitalizing parking space resources to ease urban traffic congestion.

The impacts of public transportation facilities on property prices have generated wide concerns, whereas little attention has been paid to the price impacts of automobile-oriented facilities, especially the urban expressway. Using residential property transactions and the Desheng Expressway data from 2018 in Hangzhou, China, capitalization effects of the expressway on property prices are deeply gauged through hedonic price models and quantile regression models. Furthermore, the special concern on how the impacts differ across city regions and property price segments reveals the submarket effects of the expressway from multiple perspectives. The results indicate that properties proximity to the expressway experience significant price premiums, which first increase and then decrease with the distance from the expressway. Moreover, there are stronger preferences of households for elevated expressways in suburban areas and low-priced property neighborhoods, reflected in higher price premiums. It is worth noting that tunnel expressways have the greatest impact on property prices due to the strong willingness of homebuyers to pay for access to job and leisure, as well as clean and quiet living environments. The findings add new insights to the understanding of the economic impacts of expressways and provide policymakers with references to make reasonable public investment decisions.

Complete Streets (CS) practice in the United States is heterogeneous. While organizations like the National Complete Streets Coalition have offered guidance on the formation of a robust Complete Streets policy, the maturity of public programs for Complete Streets practice is ill-defined. This research adapts existing transportation-focused capability maturity frameworks to propose a new capability maturity model for Complete Streets that is designed to help organizations evaluate current program maturity and identify next steps for evolving practice. The model includes a self-assessment tool and a set of qualitative descriptions of incrementally increasing maturity across seven program dimensions determined to be fundamental to the success of Complete Streets programs. The proposed model is designed to assist in strategic planning and organizational capacity building.

Nowadays, land-use planning systems show structural weakness from an informative perspective, depending on the capacity to develop rapidly and accurately territorial knowledge as a decision support system (DSS). The capacity to effectively manage territorial transformations in a sustainability perspective is inadequate, especially under the pressure of rapid changes involving social, environmental, and economic dimensions. We recognize the Ecosystem Services (ES) approach as a robust framework to contribute to the renewal of the planning system by introducing spatially explicit knowledge of both actual environmental performances and the expected impacts related to land-use policies and territorial transformations. In this paper, we address the class of Regulation and Maintenance Ecosystem Services (ReMES) that has a relevant influence on the environment’s suitability to contribute to human well-being and to relate the local anthropic transformations to the larger scale where ES are provided and the impacts are tangible. The aim of this work is to propose a methodology to build a territorial knowledge infrastructure by mapping a relevant set of ReMES in Italy and identifying specialization subregions, to be intended as areas of high provision of one or more ReMES. The results, interpretable as a measure of territorial performances, represent a cross-cutting informative layer and a tool to support the comparison between different planning scenarios comprehensive of both environmental protection issues and socioeconomic development strategies.

This study examines seven small urbanized areas (UZAs) in the United States where public transit ridership increased between 2005 and 2017 in order to identify lessons for other similarly situated communities and to advance understanding of these largely overlooked transit environments. Based on hour-long phone interviews of transit leaders in these seven communities, the study reveals that these agencies have been proactively reaching out to their community members and protecting their local reputations, making smart, data-driven incremental service improvements tailored to meet the needs of their communities, and have relied extensively on partnerships with major activity centers (universities, employers, and the like) to grow their rider markets. So far, these strategies have been successful in these seven UZAs, although they continue to face the same kinds of challenges to transit use that are faced by the bigger city peers.

Unorganized city growth causes traffic congestion, and, in return, this forces governments to invest in costly buildings such as public parking lots. The demand for parking spaces has further increased due to rapid population growth, especially in metropolitan areas. One solution to this problem is to locate new public parking lots within city centers so that car owners can use these facilities instead of on-street parking. In this study, a facility location and allocation scheme was engaged to determine the optimal number of and locations for public parking lots. A multiobjective, multiperiod, decision-dependent, two-stage, stochastic mathematical model was developed to fulfill the decision makers’ aims via different objectives. In the model, three objectives were considered: minimizing total facility establishment and operational cost, minimizing average unsatisfied demand, and minimizing CO₂ emissions. The proposed framework is the first in parking lot literature to address the multiobjectivity of decision-dependent demand within an uncertain environment. The weighted sum method was used to develop the multiobjective model, and two-stage stochastic programming was applied to manage the uncertainty. Hence, the proposed model satisfies critical gaps, predominantly in relation to the problem of parking lot location, and most importantly in creating sustainable cities. The results provide meaningful outcomes for decision makers in terms of optimizing unsatisfied demand, tackling CO₂ emissions, and determining the optimal number and location of public parking lots. Furthermore, the robustness of the model was tested through sensitivity analyses.

Precarious districts are one of the world’s problems that challenge the international community due to their accelerated development and the complexity of their social, economic, and environmental dimension. Studying this problem through the slum of Sidi-Harb, located west of the city of Annaba, is the main objective of this work. In 2000, this shantytown was the subject of a project for resorption of precarious housing (RPH) initiated by the Algerian government with the support of the World Bank. The RPH as an international pilot program constituted a new model of urban planning action in which the different actors involved in the project process were put in a situation of coproduction. Conducted by the Ministry of Housing, which is responsible for supervision and coordination at the central level, this program aims to improve the living conditions of the poor by offering them housing that meets the construction standards set by the regulations. Thus, the study aims at defining the principles of this program and the modalities of its implementation by measuring the gap between the set objectives and a contrasting sociospatial reality. In order to meet this objective, the analysis method chosen uses a qualitative research technique that favors interview surveys and behavioral observation for a project that is said to be socially inclusive and of high quality at low cost. The results of this study show that rehabilitation and resorption policies have ambivalent and multidimensional effects. Their success therefore remains limited. Such a result is indicative of undermined public action. The intervention process is carried out in a random and circumstantial manner, lacking a scientific framework, and followed the directives of political management and not that of the experts and the mobilized parties. The Sidi-Harb participatory evolutionary housing program is an illustrative example of this process. In addition to the failure to take into account the social practices and dynamics in this neighborhood, the failure of the project is mainly related to the financing and the inadequacy of the standards and methodological procedures of the socioeconomic and urban realities. Intervention in precarious neighborhoods is not always synonymous with success, and for this to happen, these neighborhoods must be integrated into a genuine city project. The absence of a strategy for the effective implementation of public action produces a large gap between the discourse, the ambitions, and the reality on the ground.

Promoting the development of innovation activities has become one important strategy for major countries and municipalities globally to promote economic growth. How can innovation-based economic activities promote the formation and development of industries? Potential answers to this question are quite significant for economic development both at the city and at the metropolitan levels. China’s Hangzhou was selected as a case study to investigate the driving effects of urban innovation activities on the growth of key industries. Based on the patent data and the output value of related industries from 2008 to 2017, this research first analyzed the spatial pattern of innovation activities and then examined the correlation and causality between innovation activities and industrial growth. The results show that in innovation-based development, the local innovation activities that can be effectively intervened are generally related to the growth of their key industries, but not all of them are causal. The innovation activities related to the high-end equipment manufacturing industry have a causal relationship with their industrial developments in Hangzhou. The development of such innovation activities to a large extent shows the trend of polycentric development and noncontinuous block agglomeration. This trend is also represented as a different development process and characteristics within different regions and directions in this city. Suggestions are provided to promote the development of relevant innovation activities, which could provide spatial strategies for the effective realization of innovation-driven development in Chinese cities and beyond.

Recent studies suggest that the activity-travel patterns of parents who escort their children to school have both social and environmental impacts. This paper explores the interaction between distance and travel time levels (TTLs) for escorted trips to school. The interaction between travel time and distance was modeled by formulating a logit-multilevel model to determine the factors that influence adults’ transport mode choice to escort children to school in metropolitan areas of Andalusia, Spain, where accompaniment is mainly by car or on foot for a maximum reported distance of 2 km. The findings indicate that (1) the interaction between distance and time improves the explanatory capacity of the model, and (2) the odds ratio of escorted trips to school by car is much higher when TTL is low (less than 5 min) than when TTL is high (more than 15 min). These results suggest that in order to encourage people to escort children to and from school on foot, urban policies should include time policy measures to increase the time dedicated to escorting and to improve the socialization of escorting time.

Park-and-ride (P&R) and transit-oriented development (TOD) are two major strategies to leverage the high capacity of rail transit systems in urban areas. Both rooted in the station-area land, the two strategies must be reconciled in an integrated planning framework. To this end, a bilevel programming model is proposed to tackle the competitive location issue of P&R and TOD near rail transit stations: the upper level is a 0–1 programming model, simulating governmental land-use decision-making behavior with the objective of maximizing metro patronage and minimizing vehicle kilometers traveled, or minimizing vehicle hours of delay; and the lower level is the multimodal network equilibrium model, simulating travelers’ responses and assigning traffic and passenger flows in the network. The traffic analysis zones containing rail stations are divided into transit station areas and auto-oriented zones. The household residential relocation model, accessibility quantitative model, and generation-distribution joint model are used to describe the complex interactions between transit system and land-use development near rail stations. A hypothetical scenario is designed to quantitatively analyze the impacts of different station-based land-use decisions and parameters of population and employment densities. A real case study is presented to illustrate the implementation of the proposed model.

Despite scattered attempts to frame the processes of population and economic decline in cities of the global South through urban shrinkage, mechanisms identified in the core studies of this concept do not easily translate into the local dynamics and expressions in these cities. This paper investigates the applicability of urban shrinkage as a conceptual tool for analyzing the intertwined processes of population and economic decline in small-size cities of the South. In doing so, we examine the multiscalar production of economic decline and population loss in Kermanshah province in Iran and the small-size city of Harsin in this province. Adopting qualitative and quantitative methods, we identify different economic and political processes at national, provincial, and county scales that play out in shaping variegated geography of population loss and gain in this province and then examine the variegated spatial patterns of population loss and gain in Harsin. The paper suggests that instead of an analytical tool, urban shrinkage can be seen more as an umbrella term for framing such dynamics, at least in small-size cities of the South. Nevertheless, the paper concludes by identifying the ways in which urban shrinkage studies can provide a fruitful contribution to such an analysis.

With large-scale urbanization globally, the world is facing environmental problems brought about by high-density cities. To achieve sustainable development in Hong Kong, especially for the heavily loaded Cross Harbour Tunnel district, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University proposes a Green Deck over the Cross Harbour Tunnel to enhance the neighboring environments. Green belts, buildings, and a new exhibition center are planned for this deck. This will require an increase in the guest capacity of nearby hotels in the Tsim Sha Tsui East (TSTE) area. This study, therefore, investigated the development potential of the 23 existing buildings in TSTE and the environmental impact brought about by the increase of plot ration (PR)/building height (BH) in that area. Spatial analyzes of solar exposure, wind ventilation, and air temperature were conducted based on four different scenarios with various PR/BH; human thermal comfort brought about by PR/BH changes were also measured. A comparison of different scenarios revealed no significant changes in the surrounding environment. The study concludes that there is potential for PR/BH relaxations in TSTE to increase spaces to meet increased population flow.

Residents of northern Tehran are well paid and have better access to urban services, whereas their southern counterparts are paid less and deprived. Land value also differs significantly between the north and south. However, it seems that having more apt objective indicators does not necessarily lead to an enhancement in subjective indices. The hypothesis is that “Justice is not perceived at a higher level among the dwellers of the higher-income quarters of Tehran compared with their counterparts in the lower-income quarters.” To test this hypothesis, we attempted to define the criteria of justice, as perceived by Tehran citizens. According to previous studies, Tehran citizens generally perceive justice through four criteria: reduction of the gap between the poor and rich, government’s assistance to the poor, law enforcement, and absence of corruption. Based on these criteria, justice is evaluated in Niavaran (a high-income quarter in northern Tehran with good access to urban services) and NematAbad (a low-income southern quarter with poor services) via a questionnaire (a randomly selected sample of 200 people). The results show that despite the existing objective differences between the infrastructures, services, and incomes, there is no significant difference between these quarters in terms of the perceived (subjective) justice (based on Mann–Whitney U test). The citizens in both quarters are dissatisfied with the status of all criteria. It is concluded that only physical strategies and enhancement in city services have not been accountable for the promotion and a sense of justice. Thus, the attention of planners should shift from physical indicators to mental indicators.

Metropolitan regions are increasingly facing the challenges of a growing number of intercity commuting trips. Yet existing literature on this topic, particularly in the context of developing countries, is limited. This study focuses on the travel behavior of intercity commuters in the Dhaka Metropolitan Region. A binomial logit model is used to examine the mode choice between bus and rail, based on survey data collected from daily commuters who travel to Dhaka City from its nearby urban centers. The results show that commuters' sociodemographic characteristics (such as income and professional status, whether a student or not), mode attributes (such as travel time, travel cost, and additional transfer), and level of importance that is attached to transit service quality (such as comfort, seat availability, and reliability) significantly influence the mode choice decision of commuters. In addition, the model examines the predicted mode share for improved transit scenarios. Finally, this study highlights the implications of these findings for Dhaka's transportation policy.

Considering the increasing touristic supply and demand, globalization, and the entailed increases in property prices, which strategies and instruments should urban planning use to take advantage of these higher prices and revert them on behalf of the local inhabitants to ensure them a good quality of life? This article will propose a planning instrument that is based on the capture of betterments that stem from municipal decisions, which will revert to the infrastructure's provision, maintenance, and renewal that result from urban interventions or to fulfill social goals, or both in traditional residential neighborhoods. In this article, this instrument will be applied to Planning Unit UP11 (UP11) of the Urban Development Plan for the Municipality of Lagoa, Algarve, Portugal. This article could contribute to the debate on the role of planning and tourism-oriented land use management strategies, policies, and instruments. It will attempt to assess the impact of public-engendered land betterments on local populations and could create value for local communities, which ensures their quality of life.

Urban shrinkage has received extensive attention from scholars, planners, and urban policy makers. Residents’ life satisfaction and migration intention are an important basis for predicting the future development trends of shrinking cities. This study takes Yichun, a typical shrinking city in China, as an example. Based on the satisfaction and migration intention data obtained from questionnaires and in-depth interviews, the authors use factor analysis and logistic regression models to explore the impact of urban shrinkage on residents’ life satisfaction and migration intention, and the relationship between life satisfaction and migration intention. The results show that the overall life satisfaction of residents in Yichun City did not decline significantly due to urban shrinkage. The improvement of the environment and the reduction of life pressure brought about by urban shrinkage contributed to the improvement of life satisfaction, while the lack of employment opportunities, the decline of landscape, and the decline in the level of livability had negative effects on life satisfaction. Residents with low life satisfaction were more willing to move, but the personal attributes of residents also affected their migration intention.

Housing prices are deeply influenced by urban service amenities, and measuring this effect is necessary to help administrations construct informed urban planning strategies. However, studies have not fully assessed the heterogeneous and spatial effects of accessibility to urban service amenities. This study classifies urban service amenities into six categories and divides Beijing into different areas. A hedonic price model and a spatial econometric model were used to examine different categories and locations and also the spatial effects of urban service amenities. The results are as follows: (1) the influence of urban service amenities varies among different categories; specifically, dining and shopping services and health services have negative impacts, whereas other amenities have significant positive effects. (2) The effects of urban service amenities on housing prices spatially vary. The effects decrease as the distances from the central business district (CBD) and the nearest employment center increase, and this impact is different in different areas. (3) The influence has spatial spillover effects, and the “half-decline” distance is approximately 18 km. This study contributes to our awareness of the meaning and heterogeneity of the effects of urban service amenities on housing prices, demonstrating that a universal and one-size-fits-all policy should be avoided.

Although numerous studies have examined the association between quality schools and the housing market, there remains a dearth of research aimed at addressing the capitalization effects of double-attendance zones and school rankings. Based on the case of Nanjing, China, this research finds that parents are willing to pay much more to own housing in the double-attendance zones, where a housing unit is positioned in both quality elementary and junior high school zones. This research also finds that the capitalization magnitudes of housing prices effectively correspond to school rankings. This research promotes a better understanding of how public education resources are allocated and how parents’ economic abilities to purchase housing can be exchanged for their children’s access to quality schools in Chinese cities.

The ill effects of the escalating number of private vehicles on roads have become a key concern for today’s planners and development authorities. Park-and-Ride (P&R) facilities are considered as a group of valuable systems that are used to overcome these rising problems of cities if located judiciously. Several criteria play significant roles in determining the potential locations for P&Rs, but there lacks an approach to simultaneously consider multiple criteria and spatially locate P&R facilities. This study presents a spatial multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) (i.e., GIS-MCDM) approach to identify potential locations for P&R facilities considering multiple criteria. This approach uses the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to determine the relative weights of several criteria considered for locating P&Rs and the geographic information system (GIS) to identify the locations spatially. The developed approach is further applied to identify locations for P&Rs in Delhi, the capital city of India, and 10 locations that best served the maximum part of the city were found. The results show that the criterion of a P&R serving the maximum population had the highest weight for determining the potential locations. The findings of this study suggest that the developed approach will ease the decision-making process of planners regarding determining the potential locations for P&Rs.

A strong interest in fare evasion is currently emerging in all proof-of-payment transit systems owing to its severe implications. Recent research has investigated from the passenger perspective how sociodemographic variables, travel behavior, and situational factors affect the intention to evade fares for students, workers, and unemployed passengers. Conversely, testing the demographic segmentation of passengers clustered according to gender and age variables and isolating the key factors related to the intention to evade fares have not yet been addressed. Besides the context of the smart cities’ paradigm, the fight against fare evasion has been little dealt with, also owing to the difficulty in being able to frame such an issue within the classic pillars of smartness. This study covers these gaps using a two-step approach. First, gender and age variables are used to define five demographic segments: male, female, young, middle-aged, and older passengers. Next, crucial determinants are detected for each segment using statistical models. The analysis revealed that the intention to evade fares increases for males who travel a lot during the day and for females who are dissatisfied with the service and know the fine amount. Moreover, it increases for young, middle-aged, and older passengers that make short trips, often travel, and use various transit systems, respectively. Finally, the intention to evade fares increases for each segment when passengers have a history of fare evasion. The overall findings may help bus operators plan tailored countermeasures against specific segments.

The relationship between the city and nature for the architect and urban planner is the relationship between the built and unbuilt space and the relationship between the users of urban space (public and private) and nature. In the particular context of the world-renowned El Kala nature reserve, this study analyses the place of nature in the city’s urban development. The aim is to answer the following question: What interpretation of the relationship between city and nature can be made through the urban and architectural composition and its use by the inhabitants? This study is based on the biophilic approach, whose main stages are: landscape analysis and another documentary one in which the instruments of urban planning, the plans of allotments, and masses are the tools to determine the uses of nature at the scale of the house. The results are summarized in a relationship between the city and nature, translated into multiple biophilic behaviors. These behaviors vary from one natural element to another for the professionals of the urban space and are generally positive for the inhabitants.

During the last 30 years, housing prices in China have increased dramatically, and yet very little empirical research has been carried out to explore the effectiveness of urban housing prices on advanced industrial structures. Based on the analysis framework of the core–periphery model (CP model), this study examined the mechanism of high housing prices affecting the advancement of the industrial structure from two perspectives which are blood-sucking effect and crowding effect. Using the dynamic panel data of 35 large and medium-sized cities in China from 2007 to 2018, this study aims to explore the effects of the influence of urban housing prices on the advancement of the industrial structure. The results illustrated that the relationship between housing prices and the output value of the tertiary industry showed a relationship of first rising and then falling in the eastern region, a relationship of falling first and then rising in the central region, and a positive correlation in the western region. The policy implication of this study is that the formulation of policies should not only make full use of the inducing effect of regional housing price differences on the advancement of the industrial structure but also prevent the irrational rise of housing prices from inhibiting the upgrading of the industrial structure. This research benefits both academics and practitioners by contributing to cumulative theoretical developments related to regional coordination, and by offering corresponding urban planning policy recommendations to achieve a fit between house prices and advanced industrial structure.

With the adoption of the United Nations’ Agenda 2030, some member states of the European Union have voluntarily assessed their state regarding the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by use of the United Nations’ monitoring system for administrative bodies. However, this system does not consider specific challenges in achieving SDGs that are faced with respect to vulnerable geographical contexts. Among these contexts falls the emblematic case of insular regions suffering from particular natural and geographical “handicaps” that, in most cases, confine their efforts to SDG achievements. The goal of this paper is to feature a monitoring system that is capable of measuring progress of insular territorial contexts to 2030 SDGs; the study is adjusted to the islands’ particularities. In doing so, the link between the structural problems of the islands and the UN 2030 SDGs is established, feeding the design of a monitoring mechanism by means of an Islands Sustainable Development Index (I_ISD). I_ISD integrates environmental, social, economic, and innovation dimensions, represented by four core indicators, namely the I_END, I_SD, I_ED, and I_ID, respectively. The results of this research demonstrate: (i) the need to assess progress of the islands toward the SDGs, taking into account the “insularity” dimension, that is, incorporating in the monitoring system respective intrinsic and extrinsic peculiarities of such territorial contexts; and (ii) how intrinsic quantitative and qualitative attributes of island regions, embedded in an integrated analytical approach, can inform strategic decision making in order to achieve higher levels of sustainability performance in these specific territorial entities.