Richmond, Virginia has implemented numerous mixed land-use policies to encourage non-private-vehicle commuting for decades based on the best practices of other cities and the assumption that land-use mixture would positively lead to trip reduction. This paper uses both Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and statistical tools to empirically test this hypothesis. With local land use and trip making data as inputs, it first calculates two common indices of land-use mixture - entropy and dissimilarity indices, using GIS tool, supplemented by Microsoft Excel.

Den Begriff des Urbanen in Auseinandersetzung mit dem Suburbanen zu bestimmen, ist horizonterweiternd. Nicht, dass er nach der Lektüre von Suburban Constellations an Schärfe gewonnen hätte, wohl aber hat sich meine Aufmerksamkeit für scheinbar banale Phänomene außerhalb der Stadt geschärft. Neu ist die enorme Bandbreite suburbaner Fallstudien aus dem ‚Globalen Norden‘ und dem ‚Globalen Süden‘, die hier versammelt werden.

The emergence of GIS and the availability of high resolution geographic data have improved our ability to investigate the residential segregation in cities and to identify the temporal changes of the spatial phenomena. Using GIS, we have quantitatively and visually analyzed the correspondence between land-use distribution and Arab residential patterns and their changes in the period between 1983 and 2008 in five mixed Arab-Jewish Israeli cities. Results show a correspondence between the dynamics of Arab/Jewish residential patterns and the spatial distribution of various land-uses.

This paper discusses the agrarian problem in Brazilian rural areas from the environmental point of view. The objective is to examine how the private appropriation of the Brazilian rural space came about, attributing to the environmental factor a role whose logic was relevant in the inherited agricultural context. According to this hypothesis, the specificity of the private appropriation process of public land, after 1850, is the origin of agricultural and environmental problems in the Brazilian rural space.

Immediately after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza the national religious youngsters (Gush Emmunim settlers) reached out to settle the new frontier of the biblical places. By thus, they have developed a Messianic myth. The interpretation of Gush-Emmunim settlers’ experience of landscapes reveals a complex and contradictory structure of sense of space. Settlers’ mythical sense of space may be understood in two strata - imagined and material.

The present study assesses changes (1949-2008) in the structure of a Mediterranean urban area (Rome, Italy) in three phases (compact growth, medium-density growth, low-density growth) of its recent expansion which reflect different economic contexts at the local scale. Using a quantitative approach based on land-use indicators and landscape metrics, distribution and fragmentation of built-up areas were analyzed from high-resolution and diachronic digital maps covering the investigated area (1,500 km2).

This is an empirical study of economic measurement of the optimal size of
seven cities in West Sumatra region, Indonesia. The empirical findings are quite interesting
since the calculated optimal city size does not result in a single measure as mostly
previous studies found, but they vary in accordance with the economic approaches used.
The optimal city size measured by using the maximum profit approach would have been
larger in size compared to those measured by the minimum cost and maximum net benefit

Urban sprawl has become a remarkable characteristic of urban development worldwide in the last decades. Urban sprawl refers to the extent of urbanization, which is a global phenomenon mainly driven by population growth and large scale migration. In developing countries like Iran, urban sprawl is taking its toll on the natural resources at an alarming pace. The purpose of this paper is to study urban growth and effective factors on them in the city of Urmia, Iran. We used quantitive data of the study area from the period between 1989 and 2007, and population censuses of Urmia.

The insufficient supply of serviced land at affordable prices for
the urban poor and the need for regularization of the consequent
illegal occupations in urban areas are two of the most
important issues on the Latin American land policy agenda.
Taking a structural/integrated view on the functioning
of the urban land market in Latin America, this paper discusses
the nexus between the formal and the informal land markets. It
thus exposes the perverse feedback effects that curative regularization

Urban sprawl is a concept commonly used to describe the physical expansion of urban areas. It is traditionally associated with lower residential density, poorer connectivity, and higher energy costs for heating and transport. From the period of 1980 to 2000, the extent of the built-up area in Europe has increased at a rate three times higher than that of population increase, and urban sprawl is now recognized as a major challenge. However, for policies to address this issue, it is essential to be able to identify and quantify sprawl.

We live in an urbanizing world. Since 2008, more than half of humanity lives in cities, both large and small, and old and new.[...]

The Galapagos Islands are a unique sanctuary for wildlife and have gone through a fluctuating process of urbanization in the three main inhabited islands. Despite being colonized since the 1800s, it is during the last 25 years that a dramatic increase in population has been observed. Analyzing impervious surface change over this period in an ecologically fragile environment is a challenging task, thus two methods that have been widely employed in studying urban environments were compared in this study: sub-pixel using spectral mixture analyses (SMA) and object-based classification.