Regional planning | EPFL Graph Search

Regional planning deals with the efficient placement of land-use activities, infrastructure, and settlement growth across a larger area of land than an individual city or town. Regional planning is related to urban planning as it relates land use practices on a broader scale. It also includes formulating laws that will guide the efficient planning and management of such said regions. Regional planning can be comprehensive by covering various subjects, but it more often specifies a particular subject, which requires region-wide consideration. Regions require various land uses; protection of farmland, cities, industrial space, transportation hubs and infrastructure, military bases, and wilderness. Regional planning is the science of efficient placement of infrastructure and zoning for the sustainable growth of a region. Advocates for regional planning such as new urbanist Peter Calthorpe, promote the approach because it can address region-wide environmental, social, and economic iss

An optimization framework for the development of efficient one-way car-sharing systems

Burak Boyaci, Nikolaos Geroliminis, Konstantinos Zografos

Electric vehicle-sharing systems have been introduced to a number of cities as a means of increasing mobility, reducing congestion, and pollution. Electric vehicle-sharing systems can offer one or two-way services. One-way systems provide more flexibility to users since they can be dropped-off at any station. However, their modeling involves a number of complexities arising from the need to relocate vehicles accumulated at certain stations. The planning of one-way electric vehicle-sharing systems involves a host of strongly interacting decisions regarding the number, size and location of stations, as well as the fleet size. In this paper we develop and solve a multi-objective MILP model for planning one-way vehicle-sharing systems taking into account vehicle relocation and electric vehicle charging requirements. For real world problems the size of the problem becomes intractable due to the extremely large number of relocation variables. In order to cope with this problem we introduce an aggregate model using the concept of the virtual hub. This transformation allows the solution of the problem with a branch-and-bound approach. The proposed approach generates the efficient frontier and allows decision makers to examine the trade-off between operator’s and users’ benefits. The capabilities of the proposed approach are demonstrated on a large scale real world problem with available data from Nice, France. Extensive sensitivity analysis was performed by varying demand, station accessibility distance and subsidy levels. The results provide useful insights regarding the efficient planning of one-way electric vehicle-sharing systems and allow decision makers to quantify the trade-off between operator’s and users’ benefits.

Elsevier2015

Spaces and Flows: An International Journal of Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Nancy Raewyn Couling

Ocean space is currently being urbanized on an unprecedented scale, a phenomenon under investigation by the architectural laboratoire bâle, EPFL Switzerland. Lefebvre writes of the all-encompassing process of urbanization, that agriculture, industry and urbanization follow each other (Lefebvre 2003). This model can be tested for ocean space, which already plays a major role within mobility and organisational networks and is at the same time a fluid, partially industrialised landscape of dimensions often far exceeding comparable zones on land. The research aims to investigate these relationships, position ocean spatial typologies within the urban debate and identify planning tools informed by the physical, as opposed to the virtual, condition of flow, which implement the ocean itself as an “active” agent. In the case of the Barents Sea in northern Norway, the interest in ocean space is fuelled by the opening of the Northern Sea Route to Asia and the prospect of releasing vast off-shore reserves of oil & gas on the one hand, and the alarming rate of global warming as reflected in the receding ice-front on the other. The strategic development of infrastructure, the provision of access and the complex grid of international networks active in the region are indicators of a particular type of urbanism acting at the territorial scale. This specific character, however, demands an urbanism of flows. Despite its remoteness, its vastness, its extreme climatic and light conditions, its relatively sparse human population and its abundance of natural habitats, this territory is under extreme pressure. The Barents Sea exemplifies the need for a new kind of spatial strategy, a strategy which works with the dynamics of the ocean and its potential for the current urbanization processes. How can urban design methods and principles be applied to ocean territory and how can natural “clients” such as inhabitants, or phenomena such as ice, be catered for in planning terms? The laboratory’s project developed “territorial constitutions” for the Barents Sea which were then further articulated in singular architectural projects as a proof of concept. The context revealed itself to be both an extremely harsh and aesthetic natural environment and a correspondingly extreme artificial and utilitarian built environment.

2014

A fine scale analysis of socio-economic and landscape variables for the assessment of health status in Geneva

Joël Chételat, Idris Guessous, Stéphane Joost, Abram Pointet

Significant differences in health status between inhabitants of different commune types of the Geneva area have recently been established in a study relying on a large health database managed by the Unit of Population Epidemiology of the Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève (HUG). For instance, the mean Body Mass Index is lower in richer communes than in other urban areas. Moreover, suburban residents and commuting populations have a higher hypertension prevalence than other communities. Though socio-economic status appears to be an essential driver for quality of life and health, specific knowledge is lacking to define which variables are of main concern. Besides, the relationship between socio-economic conditions and neighbouring living environment is only implicit. The objective of the present study is to detail the spatial differences coarsely observed previously. More particularly, it aims to determine to which extent landscape indicators are related to health risk factors and to identify areas where prevalence of health risk factors is potentially high on a fine scale basis. The study reuses the “Bus santé” database containing health-related information for more than 10'000 participants collected since 1998.Stratified sampling by age and by gender was used for the survey to be representative of the population. Samples were geocoded so that they can be analysed in a Geographic Information System (GIS). The Geneva canton has been divided into some 1600 homogeneous zones called Microregions based on the number of inhabitants, jobs, buildings and dwellings. Demographic, socio-economic and landscape variables such as the proportion of built-in surface and volume or the Shannon land use diversity index inform each of the Microregions. Significant factors characterising them are identified using factor analysis in order to make a spatial typology. A multiple regression is applied to assess the relationship between a set of health variables (including blood pressure and hypertension, glucose level and diabetes) from the sampled individuals contained within the Microregions and the factors describing these. Results of this fine scale analysis show the importance of income and socio-cultural membership as primary variables related to lifestyle and potential health status. The chosen landscape composition and structure variables come as complementary explanatory factors of neighbourhood counting for well-being or on the contrary stress-related illness. As an environmental health research, this study directly contributes to address land planning issues and inform on how landscape design potentially impacts quality of life and population health. Moreover, it serves to identify spatial types where risk factors are high and locate them in the geographical space.