11.522: UIS Research Seminar (Fall 2015) - Discussion notes

Monday, September 22, 2015, 6-8 PM

Modeling Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Interactions

Discussion Leader: Joe Ferreira

As we have seen in this seminar during the first few weeks of readings and discussion, there is a long history of efforts to utilize computer-based land use planning models in order to anticipate, and manage, the impacts of metropolitan growth. In the US, early efforts in the late fifties and sixties focused on the ripple effects on urban growth, urban spatial structure, and land prices of increasing automobile ownership and highway construction. In the seventies and eighties, energy price shocks and new attention to environmental externalities and ecology-based "limits to growth" resulted in the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and increased regulation of development based on environmental impact assessment. Over time, the initial enthusiasm about the use of large scale land use planning models has been tempered by various articles about the inherent limits of large-scale models (dating back to Doug Lee's famous article in JAPA in 1973, "A Requiem for Large Scale Modeling") and the conservative-led rollback of regulation in the eighties and nineties. Nevertheless, during the past two decades, there has been a resurgence of interest in large-scale land use modeling. The advent of the "information age" has increased the availability of relevant data, stimulated the growth of GIS and related technologies, greatly expanded access to computing, and dramatically reduced the cost of computer-based analysis and simulation modeling. Today, there is much less questioning about 'whether to use urban models' but much more sophistication about types of urban models, the roles that they can and do play in debating and designing urban futures, and the planning processes and professional expertise that make the most of detailed modeling and analysis.

For this seminar, we asked everyone to read Doug Lee's 'Requiem' paper, Dick Klosterman's 1994 review of the large-scale modeling literature (as it became clear that emergence of widespread computing and GIS was stimulating a resurgence of interest in urban modeling, and Paul Waddell's 2002 piece in JAPA on one of the more detailed and complex urban models, UrbanSim. The above paragraph and the first few Discussion Questions listed below are sufficient to stimulate our discussion of the three papers - and would be sufficient for you to describe a topic of interest, and related readings, in advance of your leading a seminar discussion.

For the second hour of today's seminar, however, I will present some additional material about long range land use planning efforts in Boston in order to extend our discussion of urban modeling. This presentation will draw on additional readings, listed below, about the 'MetroFuture' planning effort of Boston's Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC). The organization, MAPC, has undertaken a MetroFuture regional planning process during the past few years that has involved alternative scenario modeling using Comunity Viz add-ons to ArcGIS software. In addition, the state's GIS office (MassGIS) is helping a new Governor and the state's Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs (EOEEA) develop a 'climate roadmap' for understanding the energy and environmental impacts of metropolitan growth. The modeling efforts in Boston are recent and involve some new technology, but are by no means the most extensive metropolitan model that has been developed to date. (A more sophisticated large scale urban model is UrbanSim - see the reference below. However, UrbanSim is far too detailed and data hungry to be used without a substantial multi-year model development effort.)

As part of the Boston modeling efforts, students in 11.521/524 have examined the vehicle-mile-travel (VMT) implications of alternative metro growth strategies, and the work led to a TGIS paper and a PhD dissertation listed below under item 2 of the "Other Background Readings." We will use the class projects, and the MetroFuture effort, as a window into the world of urban modeling and the many issues associated with incorporating urban models into urban and regional planning. As indicated in the TGIS paper, the class project took as a given the MAPC year-2030 population and employment projections (at a traffic analysis zone scale) for two different growth scenarios: "let it be" and "winds of change." The project then modeled the sub-TAZ location of new residences under both scenarios using Vehicle-Miles-Traveled (VMT) data from MassGIS to estimate the VMT implications of each growth scenario. The VMT data were derived from Massaschusetts safety inspection data whereby every registered vehicle is inspected annually and their odometer reading is recorded - and then geocoded to a residential location by MassGIS. Subsequently, Mi Diao (now a Professor at the National University of Singapore) used the VMT data for his DUSP PhD dissertation to study the relationship between VMT and the built environment.

Readings:

  1. Douglass B. Lee Jr. (1973): Requiem for Large-Scale Models, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 39:3, 163-178 (This Journal is now called JAPA=Journal of American Planning Association)
  2. Klosterman, R.E. 1994: An Introduction to the Literature on Large-Scale Models. Journal of the American Planning Association 60(1): 41-44.
  3. Waddell, P. 2002: UrbanSim: Modeling Urban Development for Land Use, Transportation and Environmental Planning. Journal of American Planning Association 68: 297-314.

Other Background Readings:

  1. Metro Boston land use planning:
    1. MetroFuture, website: http://metrofuture.org/ (accessed 9-22-14), An Initiative of the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), http://www.mapc.org.
    2. MetroFuture, "Exercise #1: Explore a Scenario - Your Guide to the 'Winds of Change' Scenario," December, 2006. [Read this description of the urban modeling indicators developed for the 'winds of change' scenario as part of the MetroFuture urban modeling effort (using Community Viz and ArcGIS Software): http://mit.edu/11.521/proj11/metrofuture/explore_scenario_woc.pdf ]
  2. Built Environment Effect on VMT:
    1. Diao, M., "Sustainable Metropolitan Growth Strategies: Exploring the Role of the Built Environment," PhD dissertation, MIT, Sept. 2010.
    2. Ferreira, J, Mi Diao, and Jingsi Xu, "Estimating the Vehicle-Miles-Traveled Implications of alternative metropolitan Growth Scenarios: A Boston Example," Transactions in GIS, 17(5): 645-660, 2013.
  3. Implementation of (modified) UrbanSim model for Lisbon
    1. Weifeng Li's PhD dissertation (Feb. 2015) - Planning for Land-use and Transportation Alternatives: Towards Household Activity-based Urban Modeling for Sustainable Futures
  4. Relatted readinsg about evolution of urban models, GIS, and urban infrasturcture for urban planning
    1. Ferreira, J., M. Diao, Y. Zhu, W. Li, and S. Jiang (2010), “Information Infrastructure for Research Collaboration in Land Use, Transportation, and Environmental Planning,” Transportation Research Record, No. 2183, pp. 85–93.
    2. Ferreira, J. (2008), "GIS Evolution: Are We Messed Up By Mashups, " Comment on French and Drummond: “The Future of GIS in Planning: Converging Technologies and Diverging Interests,” Journal of the American Planning Association, Spring 2008.
    3. Harris, B., (1989) “Beyond Geographic Information Systems: Computers and the Planning Professional”, Journal of the American Planning Association, 55, 85-92.
    4. Klosterman, R., (2001) “Evolving conceptions of Information Systems Technology”, in Planning Support System: Integration Geographic Information Systems, Models and Visualization Tools, Brail, R. and Klosterman, R., (eds.), ESRI Press, Corona, California.

Discussion questions:

(a) What are Doug Lee's 7 deadly sins? Are they still relevant today? In what way has the evolution of information technology and urban databases changed the type of urban models that are built as well as their purpose and audience?

(b) What are the different types of urban growth models? What do they assume? What do they emphasize? When are they appropriate? What is the difference between 'alternative scenario modeling' and traditional large-scale urban models?

(c) How does the metropolitan information infrastructure impact the type of urban modeling that is possible, practical, useful for more than the agency that builds it, etc.? GIS technology is evolving from a desktop application, to enterprise GIS, and eventually to geoprocessing services. How will this change the structure and usefulness of urban modeling? What agencies should be involved and how can they contribute to a shared model?

(d) Who benefits from urban growth modeling? How does their use change the planning process? Is MAPC a netural party? Is this a PPGIS (public participation GIS) example? What if MetroFuture had no urban growth model?

(e) What are the key regional planning issues for metro Boston? How can (should) urban modeling help in addressing these issues? Is it a matter of straightforward accounting of basic population, employment, infrastructure, and resource use? Are there complex interactions and ripple effects that require sophisticated modeling and counterintuitive results? Is it a zero sum game with winners and losers within the region? Is it a short vs. long-term planning problem? Is there a strategy that all parties might agree to?

(f) Are the privacy and 'big brother' issues sufficient to limit access to and use of the types of data needed to develop the 250x250m grid cell layers that MassGIS produces? What about the next step where mileage data (from the safety inspections) for every registered car could be associated with each grid cell? How can these concerns be addressed while still making sufficient data available for urban modeling and analyses?

 


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