Zoekresultaten

Curbing urban logistics - the interactions between urban logistics and spatial planning.

Happiness, Space and Place

There has been a rapidly growing number of studies of the geographical aspects of happiness and well-being. Many of these studies have been highlighting the role of space and place and of individual and spatial contextual determinants of happiness. However, most of the studies to date do not explicitly consider spatial clustering and possible spatial spillover effects of happiness and well-being. The few studies that do consider spatial clustering and spillovers conduct the analysis at a relatively coarse geographical scale of country or region. This article analyses such effects at a much smaller geographical unit: community areas. These are small area level geographies at the intra-urban level. In particular, the article presents a spatial econometric approach to the analysis of life satisfaction data aggregated to 1,215 communities in Canada and examines spatial clustering and spatial spillovers. Communities are suitable given that they form a small geographical reference point for households. We find that communities’ life satisfaction is spatially clustered while regression results show that it is associated to the life satisfaction of neighbouring communities as well as to the latter's average household income and unemployment rate. We consider the role of shared cultural traits and institutions that may explain such spillovers of life satisfaction. The findings highlight the importance of neighbouring characteristics when discussing policies to improve the well-being of a (small area) place.

Curbing Urban Logistics – a study of the interactions between urban logistics and spatial planning

Efforts to reduce negative externalities of urban logistics vehicle movements often concentrate on two aspects; organizing logistics more efficiently in order to reduce the number of incoming vehicles in urban areas and reducing the emissions of vehicles within urban areas. The stopping practices are an underexposed area, in research and spatial planning. Even if movements into an area are organized more efficiently and vehicles might be zero emission, at the end of the day, logistics vehicles need to stop close to their destination to deliver goods or perform services. Herewith those vehicles put a claim upon – increasingly scarce – urban space with possible subsequential negative effects for both urban residents and drivers. This research develops a typology for urban stopping practices of logistics vehicles, including temporal and spatial aspects. Based on a survey with drivers, and interviews with experts and policy makers, the potential of different interventions to reduce the negative externalities of stopping practices is assessed. Despite the impact on policy goals, urban logistics stopping receives little attention from public stakeholders and is largely left to self-organization. Digitization and (bottomup) enforcement are interesting interventions, while drivers also indicate that more space allocated to logistics functions is inevitable. The best mix of interventions, including allocation of locations and enforcement, would both be high and low technology. Cities can benefit from a more desired situation by looking into physical interventions before digital interventions are ready for deployment.

Combining ecosystem modeling with serious gaming in support of transboundary maritime spatial planning

The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge simulation platform helps planners and stakeholders understand and manage the complexity of MSP. In the interactive simulation, different data layers covering an entire sea region can be viewed to make an assessment of the current status. Users can create scenarios for future uses of the marine space over a period of several decades. Changes in energy infrastructure, shipping, and the marine environment are then simulated, and the effects are visualized using indicators and heat maps. The platform is built with advanced game technology and uses aspects of role-play to create interactive sessions; it can thus be referred to as serious gaming. To calculate and visualize the effects of planning decisions on the marine ecology, we integrated the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modeling approach into the platform. We demonstrate how EwE was connected to MSP, considering the range of constraints imposed by running scientific software in interactive serious gaming sessions while still providing cascading ecological feedback in response to planning actions. We explored the connection by adapting two published ecological models for use in MSP sessions. We conclude with lessons learned and identify future developments of the simulation platform.

Spatial Transformations 2020

The influence of geographical resolution of urban exposure data in an earthquake loss model for Istanbul

Exposure data available to developers of earthquake loss models are often very crudely aggregated spatially, and in such cases very considerable effort can be required to refine the geographical resolution of the building stock inventory. The influence of the geographical resolution of the exposure data for the Sea of Marmara region in Turkey is explored using several different levels of spatial aggregation to estimate the losses due to a single earthquake scenario. The results show that the total damage over an urban area, expressed as a mean damage ratio (MDR), is rather insensitive to the spatial resolution of the exposure data if a sufficiently large number of ground-motion simulations are used. However, the variability of the MDR estimates does reduce as the spatial resolution becomes higher, reducing the number of simulations required, although there appears to be a law of diminishing returns in going to very high exposure data resolution. This is largely due to the inherent and irreducible spatial variability of ground motion, which suggests that if only mean MDR estimates are needed, the effort required to refine the spatial definition of exposure data is not justified.