Citizen Planners: Shaping Communities with Spatial Tools describes how geographic information systems can be made accessible to ordinary citizens with little or no professional training to help plan and shape their local communities. The book focuses on the efforts of a group of Wisconsin citizens from all backgrounds who pushed for legislation that resulted in the GIS-based Wisconsin Land Information Program. The authors share the ideas, observations, experiences, and outcomes from this c...

This book is intended for the GIS Science and Decision Science communities. It is primarily targeted at postgraduate students and practitioners in GIS and urban, regional and environmental planning as well as applied decision analysis. It is also suitable for those studying and working with spatial decision support systems. The main objectives of this book are to effectivley integrate Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) into Geographic Information Science (GIScience), to provide a compr...

This book summarizes the key findings of a five-year interdisciplinary research project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF). It serves as a typical case study for a rapidly growing and developing urban center – Da Nang City, which is surrounded by remote areas characterized by increasing migration and limited development. A number of German and Vietnamese universities and international institutions participated in the project, contributing their particula...

Here we use the term "field" to refer to a sphere of practical operation, and correspondingly the term "field informatics" describes informatics tools and methodologies that arise in the field. The components of field informatics are description, prediction, design and transfer, and the methods for those components vary widely. For example, we consider the social goal of revitalizing a mountainous area experiencing depopulation and we show how the tools and methodologies of field informati...

This work provides in-depth analysis of the origins of landscape ecology and its close alignment with the understanding of scale, the causes of landscape pattern, and the interactions of spatial pattern with a variety of ecological processes. The text covers the quantitative approaches that are applied widely in landscape studies, with emphasis on their appropriate use and interpretation.The field of landscape ecology has grown rapidly during this period, its concepts and methods h...

This book describes a comprehensive framework of novel simulation approaches, conventional urban models, and related data mining techniques that will help develop planning support systems in Beijing as well as other mega-metropolitan areas. It investigates the relationships between human behaviors and spatial patterns in order to simulate activities in an urban space, visualize planning alternatives, and support decision making.The book first explains urban space using geometric pa...

This book is the second in a series that examines how geographic information te- nologies (GIT) are being implemented to improve our understanding of a variety of hazard and disaster situations. The main types of technologies covered under the umbrella of GIT, as used in this volume, are geographic information systems, remote sensing (not including ground-penetrating or underwater systems), and global po- tioning systems. Our focus is on urban areas, broadly de ned in order to encompass ra...

Experiencing the world of daily life means to observe and perceive the natural, the man-made, the socio-spatial, and the politico-economic elements of the en vironment we live in. But, have you ever tried to explain the phenomena of daily life such as a traffic jam or mass transit to a child? It will take you quite a while to find suitable images to make invisible forces perceivable and con cepts like timetables, bus routes, or capacity constraints comprehensible. This exercise alone will ...

This book examines social and natural environmental changes in present-day Laos and presents a new research framework for environmental studies from an interdisciplinary point of view. In Laos, after the Lao version of perestroika, Chintanakaan Mai, in 1986, for better or worse, rural development and urbanization have progressed, and people’s livelihoods are about to change significantly. Compared to those of the neighboring countries of mainland Southeast Asia, however, many trad...

This book provides an overview of recent developments and applications of the Land Use Scanner model, which has been used in spatial planning for well over a decade. Internationally recognized as among the best of its kind, this versatile model can be applied at a national level for trend extrapolation, scenario studies and optimization, yet can also be employed in a smaller-scale regional context, as demonstrated by the assortment of regional case studies included in the book. Alongside t...

A collection of studies on the ecologies of European cities, including Paris, Zurich, and Amsterdam among others. Discussion includes the natural and historical development of each city, local flora, the environmental impact of city growth, and environmental planning, design, and management.

Sustainable development and rural policies have pursued strategies where farming has been often regarded as a factor deteriorating the ecosystem. But the current economic, social and environmental problems of the Earth probably call for examples of a positive integration between human society and nature. This research work presents more than a hundred case studies where the historical relationships between man and nature have generated, not deterioration, but cultural, environmental, socia...