General plan

Abstract: This book introduces community planning as practiced in the United States, focusing on the comprehensive plan. Sometimes known by other names - especially master plan or general plan - the type of plan described here is the predominant form of general governmental planning in the United States. Although many government agencies make plans for their own programs or facilities, the comprehensive plan is the only planning document that considers multiple programs and that accounts for activities on all land located within the planning area, including both public and private property. Written by a former president of the American Planning Association, "Community Planning" is thorough, specific, and timely. For all readers, including professional planners, planning students, and interested citizens, it provides a valuable and pragmatic view of the comprehensive plan.

Abstract: A plan consists of a goal and steps to achieve that goal. Plans are obviously a central component of the processes of communicating and understanding. A writer must evolve some general plan of what to say; and a reader must somehow be able to follow the plan along. However, there has so far been only a small amount of work which relates the psychology of planning to the act of writing.2 It might be helpful to consider some research on reading as a potential means of exploring the role of planning. Reading research has demonstrated the important role played by the mental representation formed in the mind of human beings who read texts. This representation cannot be the text itself; that is, it cannot be a linear series of individual words as presented on the page. Although this mental representation is important for many tasks, such as writing, reporting, summarizing, commenting, and so forth, readers will seldom be able to provide a wordfor-word account of the original text. Therefore, a better understanding of what this mental representation is and how it forms in long-term memory should help a writer plan texts which enable their readers to create representations that better match the writer's purpose in the communication. For a writer, the plan is like a set of directions about how to present one's materials. I shall be concerned here with three important functions that writing plans have. In their topical function, they help a writer conceive and organize main ideas on a topic. In their highlighting function, they help the writer show the reader how some ideas are of greater importance than others. In their informing function, they help the writer see how to present new knowledge while keeping readers aware of the old.

Abstract: Based on the land use maps of Beijing in 1982, 1992 and 1997, its spatial and temporal process of urban land use growth was analyzed through spatial clustering and historical morphological approaches. The growth intensity index (GII), was employed instead of growth speed to describe the spatial differentiation of urban land use growth. Assisted by spatial analysis techniques of GIS, the average GIIs per year (AGIIPY) of 155 communes or towns during 1982~1992 and 1992~1997 were calculated and then classified through the Natural Breaks method, and the spatial differentiation maps of urban land use growth in Beijing during 1982~1992 and 1992~1997 were made. This paper found: (1) Industrial land is the most important element of urban land use growth in Beijing, and its contribution rate is on the increase, which is different from the general Western urban growth model driven by residential expansion. Since 1982, the industrial land had been keeping expanded at the average rate of 24~25 km 2 per year. It is extraordinary high especially during the 1992~1997 period, while that of residential land and urban land use dropped by 59% and 24%, to 3 4 km 2 per year and 29 8 km 2 per year respectively. Thus, the contribution rate of industrial land to urban land use growth increased from 64 91% in 1982~1992 to 80 67% in 1992~1997. (2) The spatial pattern of urban land use growth in Beijing was in distinct concentric sprawl. With the growth centers' gradual shift from the inner to outside, the new added urban land use were increased in distinct concentric zones and continually encroached upon the green spaces among the central mass and those “dispersed constellations”. The total area of green spaces for isolating built up areas in General Plan of Beijing, was 314 km 2 in 1958, reduced to 260 km 2 in 1983 and 160 km 2 in 1993. The concentric sprawl pattern seriously destroyed the spatial structure of “dispersed constellations” designed by the General Plan of Beijing, and also badly worsened the regional ecological environment. (3) The growth axes of urban land use in the southern and eastern part of Beijing had stepped into their decline period. The southern and eastern part of Beijing is located in the North China Plain and have advantages in urban development space, economic and transport communication, etc., so that they are determined as the main urban development areas and direction by the latest General Plan (1991~2010). But this paper found, the two major growth axes of urban land use along the Beijing Tian Jin and Beijing Shen Zhen highways in the southern and eastern part of Beijing, had stepped into their decline period during 1992~1997. Their AGIIPY decreased from 1 63 and 1 58 during 1982~1992 to 0 86 and 0 67 respectively, and the spatial growth pattern have also switched from vigorous axial expansion to fill in among axes.

Abstract: We describe a real-life application of a new multicriteria method in the context of assisting the decision-making for a general plan in the municipality of Kirkkonummi in Uusimaa, Finland. At the time our group started working on the problem, a proposal for an overall plan had already been completed, but the order in which different regional parts of the plan should be implemented needed to be considered based on the environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedure. The EIA procedure generated a large amount of data about the different impacts of the alternatives. For this group decision making problem we developed the SMAA-3 decision support method which does not require any explicit preference information from the decision makers during the procedure. The uncertainty of the basic data is modelled using ELECTRE III-type pseudo-criteria with preference and indifference thresholds. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.