Spatial data is frequently used in urban planning contexts to support decision-making. This data can be used to plan routes through the city for public transportation or to designate zones for planning new businesses and residences. Unfortunately, few tools exist that allow non-programmers to rapidly utilize spatial data to create such plans. In this poster, we present SpaceSketch, a tool for r...

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...

We aimed to report on variation in levels of uptake of enhanced primary care item numbers between rural and urban Divisions of General Practice between November 1999 and October 2001. Most providers of EPC services and most services (close to 70%) are located in capital cities and other metropolitan centres. The average number of health assessments done per provider was slightly lower (8-14) in...

Quality is the most important consequence of an urban design project, and its promotion is the final duty of an urban designer. So "urban design guidelines" which use environmental improvement factors in their structure, have an effective role in promoting urban space quality. "Urban design guidelines" are the most important instruments in urban designers' authority, to reflect and appear im...

In recent years, motorization has accelerated the expansion of urban sprawl and the decline of central city areas in many cities in Japan. In order to reverse this trend, the Government of Japan enacted the Downtown Revitalization Act in June 2007. To revitalize the city centers, it is very important to increase the attractiveness of urban space as a whole, rather than only introducing attracti...

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...

Better information leads to better design. In landscape design, the designers care f o r what the plans will affect the urban more than what their plans will look like. In this paper, we discuss some key techniques in a GIs based landscape design system. With the advantage of the GIs, designers can make better decisions. A protorype named landscape evaluation system (LES) has been implemented. ...

while risk reduction has been mainly addressed by seismologists and engineers by now, the total impact of earthquake greatly depends on urban planning factors. the effects of planning can be considered in the socio economic and physical aspects. urban planning may have a dominant role in various earthquake phases: at the time of earthquake; rescue, and emergency, as well as temporary and perman...

BACKGROUND People with disabilities report physical barriers in doctors' offices that affect the quality of care. Whether most or few doctors' offices are accessible is not known. We address this gap with data on 2389 primary care provider facilities. OBJECTIVES The analysis seeks to describe overall primary care office physical accessibility and identify (1) in which areas offices meet acces...