This book focuses on the measurement and utilisation of quantitative indicators in the urban and regional planning fields. There has been a resurgence of academic and policy interest in using indicators to inform planning, partly in response to the current government's information intensive approach to decision-making. The content of the book falls into three broad sections: indicators usage and policy-making; methodological and conception issues; and case studies of policy indicators.
This book focuses on the measurement and utilisation of quantitative indicators in the urban and regional planning fields. There has been a resurgence of academic and policy interest in using indicators to inform planning, partly in response to the current government's information intensive approach to decision-making. The content of the book falls into three broad sections: indicators usage and policy-making; methodological and conception issues; and case studies of policy indicators.
Cities have experienced an unprecedented rate of growth in the last decade. More than half the world's population lives in urban areas, with the U.S. percentage at 80 percent. Cities have captured more than 80 percent of the globe's economic activity and offered social mobility and economic prosperity to millions by clustering creative, innovative, and educated individuals and organizations. Clustering populations, however, can compound both positive and negative conditions, with many modern urban areas experiencing growing inequality, debility, and environmental degradation. The spread and continued growth of urban areas presents a number of concerns for a sustainable future, particularly if cities cannot adequately address the rise of poverty, hunger, resource consumption, and biodiversity loss in their borders. Intended as a comparative illustration of the types of urban sustainability pathways and subsequent lessons learned existing in urban areas, this study examines specific examples that cut across geographies and scales and that feature a range of urban sustainability challenges and opportunities for collaborative learning across metropolitan regions. It focuses on nine cities across the United States and Canada (Los Angeles, CA, New York City, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, Grand Rapids, MI, Flint, MI, Cedar Rapids, IA, Chattanooga, TN, and Vancouver, Canada), chosen to represent a variety of metropolitan regions, with consideration given to city size, proximity to coastal and other waterways, susceptibility to hazards, primary industry, and several other factors.
The study of quality of urban life involves both an objective approach to analysis using spatially aggregated secondary data and a subjective approach using unit record survey data whereby people provide subjective evaluations of QOL domains. This book provides a comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives on QOUL and methodological approaches to research design to investigate QOUL and measure QOL dimensions. It incorporates empirical investigations into QOUL in a range of cities across the world.
While community quality-of-life indicators are gaining much needed attention in both scholarly work and practice, their application in the areas of parks, recreation and tourism management are not as well known. The applicability of indicator systems for natural resource and natural resource area management within the parks and recreation arena is very high, including urban parks and recreation programs and their influence on quality of life. Tourism is also an area that needs much more work in terms of assessing impacts as well as developing indicators for gauging progress in the long term. All three areas are an integrated discipline and most programs throughout the developed world are housed co-jointly. There are several researchers across the globe who are conducting innovative work in these areas. The editors feel that a volume on the topic will spur additional interests as well as serve to lead the research efforts.
This is the first volume exclusively dedicated to planning education, with a focus on India and learning from global experiences for India. Prior to the 1990s, planning education in India was largely confined to national and local economic concerns. Within a globalized scenario, such pedagogies and theories have become outmoded. With new concerns emerging in planning, new pedagogical tools and theorizations need to be developed within planning curricula to provide today’s planners with the wherewithal to adapt to changing and globalizing cities and regions in India. Therefore, the eminent contributors to this volume deal exclusively and comprehensively with planning education in a globalized context. Divided into four thematic sections, this volume provides a comprehensive view of planning education in India, with focus on: • The trajectory of planning education in India.• The kinds of knowledge used for teaching in Indian planning schools, and whether some sort of integration of diverse knowledges is achieved. • The ethical foundations of urban and regional planning in Indian planning schools. • The role of international planning perspectives in providing new insights for Indian planning education. Comprehensive and topical, this volume is of interest to academics and researchers from planning institutes, urban and regional planners and policy makers, as well as architects, social geographers and economists.
This book is comprised of articles and papers that have come about after years of academic and applied research endeavors of the practitioners and academicians in the field of urban and regional development planning. Most of these articles have already been presented and deliberated in national and international conferences held in different parts of the world, namely: Indianapolis, Newcastle upon Tyne, Rome, Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Vienna, Stockholm, Jeddah, Riyadh, Jubail, Islamabad, Penang, and Bandung. The concepts and case studies described in this book bring home the fact that the world is undergoing a gyrational transition. Not only are developed and developing countries getting influenced by each other and transforming due to a process of circular causation, but each of the two sets of countries are also undergoing a simultaneous internal transformation due to the differential infusion of technology and indigenous entrepreneurship. As a consequence, highly diversified urban systems are getting integrated interactively, leading to the formation of a global village and achievement of a unity in diversity!
In September 1977 a 'Regional Science Symposium' was held at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Organized because of the recent establishment at the Faculty of Economics of a group that is engaged in teaching and research in the field of regional science, the aim of the symposium was to make university members more familiar with regional science and to introduce the newly created group to the national and international scene. Two separate topics were selected, of potential interest to both re searchers and policy-makers. The first, spatial inequalities and regional development, was chosen because of its central place in regional science. Authors from several disciplines were asked to approach this theme from a general, policy orientated point of view. This ensured the enlightenment of the various dimensions of spatial inequality and its implications for regional policy. The results have been collected in the volume Spatial Inequalities and Regional Development. The second theme focused on spatial statistical analysis. This branch of statistics is a relatively new one which receives growing attention among researchers in the field of applied regional science. The meeting on this topic concentrated on new results of research on the use of appro priate statistical and econometric methods for analyzing spatial data. The papers concerned have been collected into another volume, Explora tory and Explanatory Statistical Analysis of Spatial Data.
