A cellular automaton is specified to give a spatially detailed represenation of the evolution of urban land-use patterns. Cell states represent land uses, and transition rules express the likelihood of a change from one state to another as a function both of existing land use in the 113-cell...

Contemporary geographic information systems (GIS) suffer from a variety of problems. These include poor performance for many operators, poor ability to handle dynamic spatial models, and poor handling of the temporal dimension. Cellular automata (CA) have much in common with raster GIS and also...

Spatial planning in the Netherlands had its heyday in the 1970s. That was the decade of rational systematic planning and a nationwide coverage of all aspects of land use by all sorts of strategic, tactical, and operational plans. It was also the decade when implementation issues reached the top...

Reviewing the state of the art in performance studies indicates that the performance approach offers a fruitful and promising way to deal with questions of the functioning and evaluation of strategic policymaking. Nevertheless the papers in this issue also present us with a host of new questions...

After a survey of 1022 households in Kumasi, the commercial centre for forest Ghana, the authors examine the characteristics of house owners and their accommodation. In particular they focus on the differences between owners who originally built the houses and those who have inherited them. They...

Traditional investment environment evaluation focuses on macrofactors, factors such as government stability, restrictions, and red tape. The introduction of GIS into this field provides investors and local government decisionmakers with more specific information on investment location. In this...

By conceiving the city as a self-organizing system, we highlight and examine three interrelated phenomena of residential sociospatial segregation in a city: the gap which exists between intentions, preferences, and motives, on the one hand, and actual spatial behavior, on the other; the...

Environmental planning in the Netherlands is in the process of integratng spatial planning and environmental policy, in an effort to develop and protect physical features which contribute to quality of life in urban areas. This is not an easy task, because spatial planning and environmental...

Urban vegetation impinges upon the physical environment by positively enhancing the microclimate and air and water quality. On the other hand, changes to the physical environment as well as the socioeconomic conditions of urban dwellers affect the health of urban vegetation and species abundance...

SIMPOP is a knowledge-based simulation system for the description of the evolution of settlement patterns over long time periods. Rules and parameters are introduced into a multiagent systems formalism where each settlement is considered as a separate entity interacting with the others and...