11.522: UIS Research Seminar (Fall 2008) - Discussion notes

Tuesday, October 28, 2008, 5:10 - 7:00 PM

Sustainable Metropolitan Growth Strategies: Exploring the Role of the Built Environment

Discussion Leader: Mi Diao

Abstract:
The sustainability of metropolitan growth has been considered one of the most significant social challenges worldwide. Among the various policy options to manage travel demand and achieve sustainable metropolitan growth, urban growth management attracts increasing interests due to its financial and political feasibility. This study looks at the core part of urban growth management: the built environment and associated land use control policies. The purposes of this study are to summarize built environment-related activities in planning and research, contribute to empirical studies on transportation-land use interaction, and evaluate the effectiveness and merit of urban growth management in planning practice.

This dissertation takes advantage of newly-available fine-grained geographic, housing and travel data, and develops an extensive and spatially detailed analysis of the built environment, place of residence, and vehicle usage. With the new datasets, this dissertation computes a set of improved indicators to characterize the built environment and incorporates these indicators into four types of analytic models for the metro Boston area. The first type of models provides an aggregate analysis of the relationship between the built environment and vehicle usage at the study zone level. The second and third types of models investigate household behavior and explore the impact of the built environment on residential location choice and household vehicle usage respectively using disaggregate household survey data. The fourth type of models assesses the impact of the built environment on residential property values. Some methodological issues in the land use-transportation interaction research such as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem, spatial autocorrelation and interaction, and residential self-selection are addressed in the empirical analysis.

The research findings could contribute to urban growth management and sustainable metropolitan growth in multiple ways, such as computing the elasticities of travel demand with respect to built environment indicators, which has important implications to a host of both short-term and long-term investment and policy decisions, estimating the virtue of the built environment features on quality of life to justify land use control policies, and providing a  related set of indicators and calibrated analytic models that can assist in ‘what if’ analyses of the environmental consequences of alternative development scenarios and land use controls.

Readings: (uploaded to project locker: /afs/athena.mit.edu/course/11/11.522/proj08/papers/diaomi_papers)

Crane, R., 2000. The Influence of Urban Form on Travel: An Interpretive Review. Journal of Planning Literature, 15, 1: 3-23.

Ewing, R. and R. Cervero, 2001. Travel and the Built Environment: A Synthesis. Transportation Research Record, No. 1780: 87-113.

Song, Yan and Gerrit J. Knaap. 2003. New Urbanism and Housing Values: A Disaggregate Assessment. Journal of Urban Economics, 54: 218 – 238.

Walker, J. and Jieping Li, 2007. Latent Lifestyle Preferences and Household Location Decisions. Journal of Geographical Systems, Vol. 9: 77-101.

Zhang, Ming and Nishant Kukadia. 2005. Metrics of Urban Form and the modifiable Areal Unit Problem. Transportation Research Record, No. 1992: 71-79.

Discussion Questions:

• What indices have you found in literature that researchers use to measure the built environment? Which ones do you prefer and why? What is the appropriate spatial resolution of built environment measures in land use-transportation modeling?
• What are the pros and cons of datasets currently used in land use-transportation interaction studies? What types of data will be ideal? How can information technology contribute to acquire better data?
• In you opinion, are urban growth management and associated land use control policies effective tools to achieve sustainable metropolitan growth? What are the pros and cons of urban growth management compared to other strategies to achieve sustainable urban growth?
• How do you think of the impact of urban growth management on the housing market? Do land use control policies influence affordable housing or quality of life?

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