Lewis D. Hopkins

• University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Actors in urban development use and respond to many plans made by organizations, both public and private, at different times with different purposes and scopes. Coping with such networks of information and constraints presents an opportunity to advance development of planning support systems (PSS). The Plans and Regulations Information Tool (PaRIT)...

Research about plans and resulting guidance for practice tend to focus on making one plan and implementing it. Plans are made and used, however, by many autonomous agents, a variety of organizations pursuing their interests while recognizing interdependence with the activities of other agents. Expanding the focus beyond one plan by one organization...

Actors in complex urban environments cope with uncertainties and interdependencies by using each other’s plans, subscribing to pre-existing decision-making frameworks, and building relationships with other actors over long periods of time. Improvisational comedians employ similar strategies to create coherent and meaningful multi-actor stories with...

The post-disaster environment consists of a compression of urban development activities in time and in a limited space, a phenomenon referred to as time compression. Some phenomena compress in time more easily than others. This differential compression leads to a distortion in the interrelationships of urban development and decision processes when...

If urban development plans were just target patterns to be achieved, conventional data structures in Geographic information systems (GIS) would be sufficient. Urban development plans have a strong spatial component, but recent literature in planning emphasizes that plans are about actions and relationships among them. These relationships include in...

This article focuses on making, assessing, and using urban design plans. It describes a framework used for assessing plans, and identifies questions for which evidence and arguments provide useful guidance on how to make and use plans well. The article explains that planning processes affect plans in their content and likelihood of implementation,...

If urban development plans were just target patterns to be achieved, conventional data structures in GIS would be sufficient. Urban development plans have a strong spatial component, but recent literature in planning emphasizes that plans are about actions and relationships among them. These relationships include interdependence, substitutability,...

A generalized conceptual framework for regional carrying capacity evaluation along with its implementation approaches is introduced in this article, demonstrated by the case study in the Yangtze River Delta region, China. Following the data preprocessing, ...

Organizations use plans for urban development, not simply as something to be implemented, but as tools to organize their own thinking, shape discussion, communicate aspirations and commitments, test ideas, and justify claims within and outside the organization. We use a cluster of decisions that occurred during the recovery of New Orleans, several...

Plans provide information about how multiple decisions are structured over time, and what the intentions of a particular actor are. As and when these decisions get made, or not made, some parts of plans become irrelevant, while some other new relationships are discovered and considered. Recognising this provides a useful way to interpret the change...

How do actions depend on decisions and plans? How do plans made by different organizations interact in influencing decisions? How do individuals with roles in more than one organization and interests in more than one issue or project influence plans? Disaster recovery planning is compressed in time, which creates a situation for efficient research...

Characterizing plans as means of interaction and influence among organizations rather than as mechanisms of control over a complex multiorganizational environment frames the question: In what circumstances should plans be shared widely? Organizations have persistent and repeated interactions about many issues, have fractured capabilities and author...

The Visual Tools for Planners website is a library of representations—combinations of graphics, numbers, and stories—to help people think about possible futures and actions that might help shape such futures. The focus is on representing change—processes, actions, consequences, and possibilities—and working with several different representations ra...

The focus of geographic and other ontologies of urban devel- opment has been to represent locations with object attributes or objects with locational attributes. Urban information systems should also repre- sent decisions, which have or could have locational attributes. Develop- ment processes are critically influenced by expectations about declare...

This paper outlines a framework for accessing multiple plans in an information system of plans (ISoP) for use in land use planning and deliberation. Using such a system can help planners analyze potential changes to urban and rural landscapes and make decisions through access to information about the intentions and related actions of others. It can...

A multiagent simulation model is used to assess the impact on single-family residential development patterns of plans for size, location, and timing of sewer line extensions, policies for extension timing, and of responses to these plans and policies by landowners and developers. The simulation constructs the sewer network over time in relation to...

The literature on planning assumes that plans, to be useful, should be public and then implemented. The participatory paradigm, with its recent resurgence, assumes that planning should be performed with stakeholders in public forums. This paper challenges the notion that plans and planning processes should be public in general or even within a grou...

Formalizes as a mathematical problem a complex version of the land use plan design problems. The formalized problem is of interest not only as a land use plan design model, but also as a general model for complex location-allocation problems that involve more than one type of spatial interaction. A realistic data set for a large land use problem is...

Mandelbaum argued against the possibility of a complete general theory of planning set out along the lines of a generalist, a priori, covering-law model. In this article we draw on Miller and Hurley to elaborate a coherentist approach to planning theories that achieves some of the aspirations Mandelbaum sought for a general theory. We argue that th...

Using plans and regulations when making decisions about urban development requires access to the many plans and regulations of many different organizations, both private and public. Current information technologies, the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular, make access to data from such disparate sources feasible. Using these technologies...

We use the term workbench to describe human–computer interactive work environments in which collaborative sketch planning is enabled rather than discouraged. These workbenches consist of both physical objects and virtual software tools. We describe here progress on two aspects of a sustained effort to develop such a sketch-planning workbench: (1) t...

Can urban growth patterns take advantage of economies of scale in infrastructure by relying on fewer and larger treatment plants? Estimates of potential cost savings from alternative wastewater treatment consolidation strategies for the metropolitan Chicago region suggest that the timing of consolidation is important. Carefully timed consolidation,...

Access to many sources of data and information is essential to supporting the use and making of plans for urban development. This information includes plans and regulations of many different players, both private sector and public agencies. It includes the data inputs and analytical outputs of planning analysis models. In order to take advantage of...

My fundamental premise is that reaching focused disagreements and then explaining them is fundamental to crafting research agendas and to using urban and environmental models. We should seek neither one integrated research agenda nor one integrated model. We should, instead, create computer modeling envi­ronments in which disagreements can emerge a...

In this article, we argue that insights can be gained by analyzing the use of urban growth boundaries (UGBs) for urban growth management as an inventory problem. The analysis provides three useful insights. First, it shows that where UGBs are employed, too much emphasis is placed on whether UGBs contain sufficient land to accommodate 20 years of gr...

Using data on vacant land sales in Washington County, Oregon, the authors find that plans for light rail investments have positive effects on land values in proposed station areas. These findings suggest that such capitalization is likely to discourage the development of low-density housing in station areas and encourage high-density, transportatio...

In this article, the authors develop three dynamic models of urban growth with a focus on the efficient utilization of lumpy urban infrastructure. First, the authors show that the optimal growth rate depends on the rate at which infrastructure capacity is consumed when public service levels are variable and produced with a fixed stock of public inf...

Planning scholarship will benefit from research conversations focused on cumulative knowledge about how planning works and how urban settlements work. Our everyday decisions present opportunities. (1) Initiate and sustain conversations through conferences. (2) Referee papers to encourage cumulative scholarship. (3) Cultivate funding sources. (4) Es...

With increased awareness of the role of plans in shaping urban and suburban landscapes has come increased criticism of planners and the planning profession. Developers, politicians, and citizens alike blame "poor planning" for a host of community ills. But what are plans really supposed to do? How do they work? What problems can they successfully a...

The idea of a planning support system, if not the label, has been with us for at least twenty-five years. Many components have been developed but we lack an underlying structure with which to integrate these components. GIS provide useful tools but the map concepts on which they are built are insufficient for a planning support system. The structur...

We describe a particular planning support system and its application to a bus routing problem to demonstrate the potential to support the iterative process of constructing and evaluating alternatives. This PSS, called PEGASUS (Procedural Expertise for Generation and Analysis of Spatial Urban Systems), supports sketching alternatives, tracing out th...

Although state and local growth management programs vary widely, nearly all such programs include one common feature: they require local governments to plan. While there has been extensive research on the effects of growth management in general and on specific policy instruments to manage urban growth there has been little research on the effects o...

Reports the development of a capacity expansion model as part of the continuing development of such a planning support system (PEGASUS: Planning Environment for Generation and Analysis of Spatial Urban Systems) to incorporate water supply. A water-distribution network analysis model and a network capacity expansion model can address the dynamic int...

Previously developed decision support systems for multiattribute evaluation focus on support of computation and representation, but provide no guidance for efficient use of methods for particular decision problems and environments. We examine a procedural support strategy to guide the decision maker in efficiently choosing what judgments to conside...

In the research design, iteration between two multiattribute techniques is used to compare their ability to elicit preferences. Each subject used one technique, then a second, and iterated between the two. Previous judgments from each technique were presented as two anchors for each succeeding judgment. The final, converged judgment is an estimate...

Modeling-to-generate alternatives (MGA) is a technique for using mathematical programming models to generate a small number of different solutions for the decision maker to consider when dealing with complex, incompletely defined problems. The logic of MGA is presented in the context of concerns about the limitations of mathematical models and the...

Multiattribute evaluation methods are being used without full understanding of the meanings of the weights which characterize the relative importance of the attributes. The weights in the methods do not carry the same meaning, even though the questions asked in the procedures are similar. The weights imply the trade-offs among attributes with respe...

Previous attempts to describe or model planning behavior have failed to focus on a decision variable for the activity of planning itself. Attempts to use economic theory to explain planning by modeling only the phenomena being planned for have not been useful in explaining or understanding planning behavior. The model developed in this paper for la...

Explanations of planning behavior generally fail to distinguish among three kinds of activities: The production of information, regulation, and collective choice. The economics of information provides a useful approach to explaining planning as the production of information, and to understanding its relationships to regulation and collective choice...

Data can be analyzed from a data structure that is organized around the relationships that are required to support decisions. This approach is more efficient than analyzing from cartographic data structures. Especially for streams data, the sensitivity to fractal dimension makes direct encoding of analytical relationships more efficient than comput...

Methods for exploring ill-defined problems are now being developed. Claims for these methods are frequently based on analogies with optimization processes. More persuasive backing for these claims can be obtained by conducting experiments that consider both the analyst or decision-maker and the method. The most fruitful experimental design is for e...

Modeling to generate alternatives (MGA) has been proposed as a framework for dealing with complex problems for which there are important unmodeled issues. MGA techniques are designed to provide the analyst (or decision maker) with a set of alternatives that are good with respect to modeled objectives and different from each other. Some of these alt...

This paper describes a theory of planning behavior and procedures for testing that theory. The theory is based on ideas from decision theory, the theory of games, and the theory of collective goods. Planning in the development of mountain resorts is used as a set of cases because there are many development actions and the communities are relatively...

A model of watershed land-use planning is formulated that improves on existing models by recognizing that land-use decisions have uncertain outcomes and that land uses change over time. Implications of recognizing the distinction between land-use decisions and their uncertain outcomes are discussed. The land-use changes are modelled using a Markov...

For a decision maker to bring implicit knowledge, that is, knowledge that cannot be incorporated into a model, to bear on a problem, he must be confronted with alternatives that are perceivable as different with respect to this implicit knowledge. A technique is presented to generate alternatives that are different from each other, but good with re...

The author's report on a study designed to provide an assessment of the potential use of one random generation method for generating good and different alternatives for a land use planning problem cast in a linear programming framework. The example problem was taken from the DuPage County, USA, land use planning model. The random method is compared...

Public-sector planning problems are typically complex, and some important planning issues cannot be captured within a mathematical programming model of a problem; such issues may be qualitative in nature, unknown, or unrevealed by decisionmakers. Furthermore, there are often numerous solutions to a mathematical formulation that are nearly the same...

An optimization model is generally not a perfect representation of a complex real world planning problem. Optimization models, however, can be used to generate alternatives that are good and different so that analysts and decision makers can examine a wide range of alternatives to gain insight and understanding. Modeling to generate alternatives (M...

A model is described that compares allocations of land uses in terms of aggregate economic rent, taking specific account of the interdependence between floodplain land uses and upstream land uses. Solution of this model by dynamic programming for the Hickory Creek watershed suggests that some restriction of land uses in the floodplain, but not for...

The modeling to generate alternatives (MGA) is described. Several new MGA methods, a random method, a branch and bound/screening method and a Fuzzy HSJ method, are described. The methods are illustrated using a wastewater treatment system planning problem, which is formulated as a mixed integer programming model.

An experiment with plant layout formulated as a quadratic assignment problem gave the following results: (1) The CRAFT algorithm does as well as human subjects in solving the plant layout problem; (2) CRAFT does better as problem size increases if the human subjects have no prior knowledge of the computer solution values; (3) there is no breakpoint...

Quadratic assignment models and linear-programming models have beenproposed for land-use plan design. The models represent transportation and divisibility of production differently and have solution algorithms with very different properties, but the most important distinction is that quadratic assignment models can handle externalities whereas line...

A dynamic programming model is developed that finds the optimal allocation of land uses to maximize economic rent to land net of flood damage. The model specifically considers the impact of upstream development on downstream flood levels and the impact of flood-plain development on the amount of damage for given flood levels. An efficient, but elem...

Land resource inventories to determine land suitabilities have become a standard part of planning analysis at many scales. Any attempt to review, compare, evaluate, or improve upon the myriad of case studies, many only partially documented and in limited circulation, suffers from the lack of reference to a common framework. This article develops a...

Models for designing suburban land-use plans are evaluated with respect to the same large well-defined test problem. This evaluation -- including quality of solutions obtained, cost of search, validity of representation, and generality -- indicates that central-facility models are likely to be more useful than quadratic assignment models for the de...

The purpose of planning models is to help determine how best to change the controllable variables of a system so that the system will move toward desired goals. In the case of public planning, the welfare criterion or planning objective is not likely to be the same as the objective function driving the behavior of the individual elements of the sys...

This Handbook was prepared for writers and reviewers of Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) in the state of Illinois. It provides a basic introduction to the preparation of these statements, and gives suggestions for content, organization, and format of presentation. This report is directed at impact statements for projects of concern at at the s...

The improvement of the process of design requires the evaluation of alternative design methods. A framework for evaluating graphically based, intuitive design methods is (1) solve a set of problems with a proven algorithm, (2) have a sample of designers solve the same set of problems, and (3) compare the results to identify the success of each desi...