Modeling and Evaluating Changes to City Urban Structure

Download or read book Modeling and Evaluating Changes to City Urban Structure written by Charles Calvin Layman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABSTRACT: This dissertation extends research that seeks a better understanding of the complex relationships between humans and the urban environment by focusing on one of the more pervasive topics in recent human-environment studies- the investigation and analysis of the connections between transportation and land-use. Currently, the multitude of environmental, economic, and social-welfare concerns incumbent to a society dependent on the automobile have compounded the need to further understand and develop models of these connections. By conceptualizing the urban environment as the locations of housing and the locations of jobs, or urban structure, this dissertation builds upon previous research that utilizes urban commuting to explore connections between transportation and land-use in US metropolitan regions. Motivated by the prospects of providing new insights into the relationship between commuting, sprawl, sustainability and the urban structure; this dissertation develops a methodology to assess and evaluate changes to the urban structure over time by synthesizing elements from both the planning and geographic literatures. The Model of Urban Structure and Evaluation of Change (MUSEC) presented in chapter 6 proposes that for a given city or region, changes to the urban structure can be modeled using homogenous data to model the urban structure and evaluated using the commuting carrying capacity to assess the changes. To better support those assumptions, two analytical chapters are presented exploring the role of homogenous data in commute studies (chapter 4) and the role of the commuting carrying capacity in urban structure assessment (chapter 5). The ability to assess urban structure changes will help broaden the understanding of the transportation/land-use connection and can provide planners, government officials, and geographers' knowledge to address prevalent urban issues such as sprawl and sustainable development.