One of the principle criticisms of urban sprawl is that it undermines the cost-effective provision of public services. In this paper the authors examine whether or not this is true through an exploratory analysis of the influence that alternative development patterns have on twelve measures of...

Visual diversity is an important component of contemporary environmental design. Current issues on visual diversity include (a) how to measure it?, (b) what is the function between visual diversity and pleasure?, and (c) is the function between visual diversity and pleasure the same for...

Space syntax research has had significant success over the years and has served to illustrate the importance of configurational measures, especially those that take into account all the spaces in a system. Here, assumptions of axial lines as elementary spatial units have been overwhelming....

Geographic information systems (GIS) have emerged over the past decade to become the most powerful and important computer application to hit the profession of planning. Although GIS is now used by most public sector planning agencies and private planning firms, planning schools have been slow to...

To what extent does the evolution of 20th-century residential area planning and development reflect the profound changes that have affected society over this period? How much was this evolution shaped by successive planning models formulated over the last century? The paper reports on an...

In this essay we review the major developments in the history and techniques of landscape visibility analysis, providing a number of examples and identifying a few critical challenges to the community of those who would seek to evaluate visibility -- and related characteristics such as visual...

A prototype decision support tool is described which provides options for the management of existing green spaces and for the establishment of new green space in suburban neighbourhoods. Suggested neighbourhood greening techniques include the naturalization of existing parks and increased...

The author explores the use of ecological-footprint analysis for evaluating and communicating the environmental implications of transport alternatives within a company travel plan. From a case study of the Vodafone headquarters in Newbury, a component ecological footprint methodology is...

Retailers use analogues (similar stores) routinely in the process of site assessment, either as a basic method of sales forecasting in its own right, or as a check on more complex quantitative models. In earlier stages of our research, we identified intuitive or qualitative causal knowledge...

A relationship between human preferences for physical properties of visual texture is established in this paper. The author asks whether there is a measurable correlation between aesthetic ratings for textural images and their physical properties. A bank of Gabor filters covering a range of...