The process of planning and constructing a new light rail system or freeway, setting an urban growth boundary, changing tax policy, or modifying zoning and land use plans is often politically charged. Our goal in the UrbanSim project is to provide tools for planners and stakeholders to be able to consider different scenarios — packages of possible policies and investments — and then, based on t...

today, sprawl is regarded as one of the serious urban problems in most countries. the problem differs from country to country depending on various geographical, economic, social, and political structures. iran is not an exception in this regard. although urbanization in many cities has been rather gradual, the very inclination of most people to prefer living in towns and cities to living in rur...

In the last decades a growing attention has been paid to the relationship between urban planning and public health. The introduction of the social model of health has stressed the importance of the determinants of health such as socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental conditions, in addition to living and working conditions. Starting from the assumption that urban planning plays a crucial ro...

Gearing cities towards a path of sustainability is a daunting task. The urban models that we have come to accept during the 20 century need to be revisited, but change, even if welcomed in abstract, is usually met in reality with enormous resistance from the economic and political models that underlie our cities. Some of the most powerful tools for promoting change are those related to conceptu...

The paper presents an overview of a nationwide research and implementation programme in New Zealand entitled ‘Low impact urban design and development: making it mainstream’ and reports on two aspects of the research underway. The purpose of the programme is to facilitate the uptake and implementation of low impact urban design and development (LIUDD) practices. The paper briefly outlines the sc...

Capturing and measuring qualities of the built environment is a fundamental aspect of planning. Planners need to develop a vivid picture of the physical and social environments people inhabit in order to understand what impacts their plans and actions may have. Measures can indicate the built environment’s qualities and represent them in a way that is useful for planning to address particular i...

The neighborhood has had a long history in Iranian urbanization. Since urban plans wereintroduced by the authorities to shape urban development in Iran half a century ago, the concept of Iranian traditional neighborhood has been neglected gradually. The concept of neighborhood has not found the appropriate status in urban design and planning yet. One of the main reasons is that academics, profe...