Critical realism as a philosophy of science has received some renewed attention, particularly with applications in urban and regional studies. The debates on planning theory in the 1970s and 1980s set a backdrop against which the relevance of critical realism for urban and regional planning may...

The concept of 'difference factor' has been widely used in syntactic analysis of space configurations as a technique to measure the strength of a spatial genotype. Where the rank order of the integration of significant household functions remains stable across a sample of dwellings, and where...

Historically, the approach to community planning and the preparation of a master plan has involved a two-dimensional visual 'land-use' methodology. Typically, land has been treated as a surface two-dimensional plane. This traditional approach is inadequate for preparing creative solutions for...

The aim of this study is to develop an operational computer-aided system for town planning. In Japan, many computer systems are employed for planning, but most of them have been developed from the perspective of data management. As such, systems are often installed in mainframe computers and...

The environmental impact assessment (ETA) process involves the consideration of large amounts of data comprising several variables and phenomena, with complex interrelationships varying in space and time. The potential of spatial information systems (SIS) has been increasingly realized for use...

In this paper attention is drawn to the rapidly increasing use of hyperdocuments to archive and access environmental data resources, and the spatial extensions required to explore and link together these data sets are discussed. To illustrate how such environmental hyper documents can be...

The author argues for the increased use of population cartograms to visualize changing geographies and uses British localities as an example. Population cartograms are increasingly being recognized by researchers as a major solution to many spatial visualization problems. The gross...

A shape grammar, which can exemplify and visually explain the style of Taiwanese traditional vernacular dwellings, is presented in the form of rules of composition that are derived from considerations of traditional processes of design and construction, and from cultural influences.

In this study, Rapoport's concept of choice and game theory was used in order to understand the trade-offs home buyers make when choosing an affordable house. Cost is a constraint on a home buyer's choices. When people have constraints on their choices, what is most critical is what they...