Following the growing urbanization, choosing and providing housing has become one of the mos t important issues for planners as well as people. Developing a comprehensive program of housing needs complete identification and deep analysis of widespread dimensions of housing and factors affecting them. In the meantime, addressing housing indices, as the key planning tool forming its main thrus t...

Residential visual privacy is an important issue in modern society. This paper proposes improved Potential Visual Exposure Index (I-PVEI) to evaluate the risks of exposure along building facades a dense residential environment. Compared with PVEI indicator, proposed method introduces observer’s view direction based on perception and applies weighting scheme construct I-PVEI. To validate I-PVEI,...

T his feature explores the operation of individual markets. Patterns of behavior in markets for specific goods and services offer lessons about the determinants and effects of supply and demand, market structure, strategic behavior, and government regulation. Suggestions for future columns and comments on past ones should be sent to James R. Hines Jr., c/o Journal of Economic Perspectives, Depa...

An analytic model of urban housing strata is developed which utilizes housing structure type, housing tenure type, floor size, physical quality, residential area, and number of rooms to calculate a housing deficit for each housing characteristic. The housing norm is subtracted from the actual housing conditions. Each housing deficit value is weighted according to the priority of the 6 variabl...

We consider a family of smooth maps on an infinite cylinder which have invariant curves that are nowhere smooth. Most points on such a curve are buried deep within its spiked structure, and the outermost exposed points of the curve constitute an invariant subset which we call the "facade" of the curve. We find that for surprisingly many of the maps in the family, all points in the facades of th...

A fully bottom-up algorithm for extracting blobs in building facades is proposed. Prototype discovery, hypothesis testing and verification are used to identify missing blobs or split the agglomerated ones, when repeated patterns are present in the facade. A novel similarity measure is used for assessing the similarity of subpatterns. The proposed algorithm can detect 80% of the 3589 hand segmen...