Pnina Plaut

Pnina Plaut
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology | technion · Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning

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64
Publications
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise

Publications

Publications (64)
Article
Purpose This study uses computer-aided design to improve the ecological and environmental sustainability of early-stage landscape designs. Urban expansion on open land and natural habitats has led to a decline in biodiversity and increased climate change impacts, affecting urban inhabitants' quality of life and well-being. While sustainability indi...
Chapter
Over the past decade, there has been a growing interest in understanding the impact of social ties on travel. Some of the questions raised are: What are the frequencies and scale of these rides? What are the means of transport taken? Furthermore, what social network parameters impact travel behaviour? While all recent studies are based on Wellman’s...
Article
This paper proposes a framework for machine learning to evaluate landscape design. In this study, we measured key performance indicators of landscape-development plans using a convolutional neural network (CNN) approach to predict the performance level of the design. The model used 3749 performance evaluations from 36 professionals, covering six su...
Article
The aim of this study was to evaluate an urban forest intervention program effect on physical activity, healthy eating habits, self-efficacy and life satisfaction (LS) among Israeli at-risk youth. The quasi-experimental study ran from September 2016 to June 2017; participants were randomly selected. There were 76 total study participants: 53 in the...
Article
Sustainability Rating Systems are standard methods for achieving sustainable development of buildings and urban landscapes. However, they suffer from low adoption and implementation rates, mainly due to labour-intensive evaluation processes. This study explores how recent advancements in big data, combined with the availability of new urban environ...
Article
Full-text available
Participation of older adults in daily activities has a major positive impact on health and contributes to a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction, self-efficacy, and well-being. Walking is considered to be one of the most influential activities promoting health and active living. Older adults are particularly vulnerable to their immediate local en...
Article
The last decades saw an increased interest in the social aspects of urban mobility, particularly in understanding the linkage between social network (SN) ties and travel behavior. Most studies analyzed ego-centric networks, focused on dyadic relations and distinguished between weak and strong ties. The purpose of this study is to understand the hid...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Three decades past since the adoption of sustainability rating systems (SRS) by the Architecture Engineering and Construction industry (AEC) as standard methods for sustainable development evaluation. Nevertheless, these methods still suffer from a low adoption and implementation rate due to their manual, labor-intensive, expert dependent, and time...
Article
Date Presented 03/28/20 The purpose was to elucidate factors—specifically mobility, behavior, and travel attitudes—that mediate between personal characteristics and participation in out-of-home activities of the elderly. Driving was found to be a major mediator between personal characteristics (e.g., age and education) and participation. The findin...
Article
Full-text available
Residential mobility patterns of immigrant and majority groups are key in understanding immi-grants' spatial integration. This article explores the spatial integration dynamics of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Tel-Aviv, Israel, as reflected in changing residential mobility behaviour. Unlike previous research, the article investigates t...
Article
Introduction A key determinant of healthy aging is active participation in daily activities. This study proposes a model that explains participation of community-dwelling older adults. The model examines travel attitudes and mobility behaviors as mediating factors between personal characteristics and participation in out-of-home daily activities....
Article
Introduction Most research on the built environment and active travel focused on the general population or segments including children, adolescents and older adults. There is limited knowledge regarding the built environment and active participation of people with disabilities. This most vulnerable population is at risk of reduced engagement in phy...
Book
Full-text available
This book brings together conceptual and empirical insights to explore the interconnections between social networks based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and travel behaviour in urban environments. Over the past decade, rapid development of ICT has led to extensive social impacts and influence on travel and mobility patterns wi...
Chapter
Full-text available
Over the past decade we have witnessed a rapid development of the information and communication technology (ICT), leading to extensive societal impacts. ICT enhanced the shift from social groups defined by location to individually based digital social networks. High-speed telecoms allow ad hoc personalized networks that affect general travel behavi...
Preprint
Full-text available
The report sums up the work of a group of 50 students in the MSc program in Planning at the Technion- Israel Institute of Technology. The studio is a first-year exercise in which the students prepare a city-level strategic plan. At first, students collect data on a variety of issues including: the political and socio-economic conditions, the built...
Article
Full-text available
There is evidence that the built environment can promote unhealthy habits which may increase the risk for obesity among adolescents. However, the majority of evidence is from North America, Europe and Australia, and less is known about other world regions. The purpose of this study was to examine how the number of overweight and obese adolescents m...
Article
Full-text available
Ethnic and socioeconomic segregation levels vary over time and so do the spatial levels of these segregations. Although a large body of research has focused on how residential mobility patterns produce segregation, little is known about how changing mobility patterns translate into temporal and scale variations in sorting. This article develops a m...
Preprint
The segregation of immigrants can be a persistent phenomenon but can also diminish and make way to processes of spatial integration. Residential mobility patterns of immigrants and natives are key in understanding these processes; they reflect mechanisms such as spatial assimilation and voluntary segregation from the part of immigrants, and spatial...
Article
Full-text available
Background: At-risk adolescents have been defined as youth who are or might be in physical, mental, or emotional danger. An Urban Forest Health Intervention Program (UFHIP) was formed at a center for at-risk adolescents in Israel, in order to promote physical activity and reduce risky behavior. Objective: To evaluate the intervention’s effect on ph...
Article
Full-text available
Biosphere Reserves (BR) are designed to deal with one of the most important issues facing the world today: how do we reconcile biodiversity and natural resource conservation, while allowing their sustainable use? (UNESCO 1995, Ishwaran & Persic 2008). BRs are sites, designated by UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere program, with spatial, social and administ...
Article
Full-text available
Children’s outdoors play (OP) is an important source of physical activity that has been decreasing in recent years due to changes in neighborhood design, parent safety concerns and child sedentary leisure. However, few studies examined such determinants from children’s perspectives. This study explores environmental and socio-cultural aspects of ch...
Article
Full-text available
The literature on environmental walkability to date has mainly focused on walking and related health outcomes. While previous studies suggest associations between walking and spatial knowledge, the associations between environmental walkability and spatial knowledge is yet to be explored. The current study addresses this lacuna in research by explo...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The notion of “smart cities” has gained much popularity over the past few years, fueled by emerging needs and opportunities, and accompanied by considerable political and commercial hype. But in fact, throughout their long history cities have always strived to become “smarter”, in order to mitigate existential challenges such as defending their cit...
Chapter
It is well established that there exist numerous correlations between spouses with respect to economic, social, and other characteristics. Some of these correlations, in turn, may contribute to patterns of inequality across households regarding income and wealth. For example, the more closely correlated are salary levels of husbands and wives, the...
Technical Report
Full-text available
This deliverable (2.1B) forms one of three linked reports produced within the Mind-sets project under its second workpackage. The objective of this report is to coordinate the understanding of mobility from the viewpoint of several key disciplines – economics, psychology, sociology, geography and the impact of new internet technologies. In turn, th...
Article
Full-text available
Previous studies examined environmental correlates of children’s physical activity. While most of these studies used aggregated physical activity measures (i.e., overall physical activity, active travel), little is known about the contribution of specific environmental attributes to specific types of physical activity. This study examined associati...
Article
Full-text available
Childhood and adolescent overweight/obesity is a major burden on public health worldwide. A growing body of empirical evidence highlights the impact of community characteristics of childhood obesity. This study explored socioeconomic and spatial variations of adolescent overweight/obesity in Israel by using an ecological approach. Towns' socioecono...
Article
This article analyses income inequality in Israel and the role of ethnicity in creating or explaining it. It shows that in spite of relatively large ‘raw’ disparities in mean incomes across the ethnic groups, when controlling for other non-ethnic factors it is not generally the case that Arabs underperform in the Israeli labour markets compared wit...
Article
Full-text available
The dynamics of residential sorting have been previously explored using segregation models. In contrast with these models which emphasize resultant spatial distributions, this paper suggests an approach of assessing temporal income sorting trends through the analysis of residential mobility patterns. The approach is focused on ‘gains’ in neighborho...
Article
In most countries, the dissolution of marriage through divorce and marital separation is growing. Such trends affect many things, including of course, child rearing, but also housing tenure. Relatively little is known about the housing tenure results of divorce outside Western countries and even less is known in general about the ¡§separated¡¨, who...
Article
Full-text available
While physical activity (PA) provides many physical, social, and mental health benefits for older adults, they are the least physically active age group. Ecological models highlight the importance of the physical environment in promoting PA. However, results of previous quantitative research revealed inconsistencies in environmental correlates of o...
Article
Gated communities have grown in importance in the United States in recent years and they are also common in many other countries. Relatively little is known about the factors and tradeoffs associated with the preferences of households to live in such communities. There is a popular perception of gated communities being refuges for higher income and...
Article
Full-text available
Housing renovation is the main alternative means of housing supply besides construction of new housing. Relatively little is known about the factors that affect decisions by households about whether to renovate and which sort of renovations to undertake. These questions are explored empirically. Separate analyses are conducted of the decision to un...
Article
This paper is an empirical analysis of the relationships between commuting decisions of spouses in dual-income households, where the role of housing and housing tenure is taken into account. The study is based on a large survey of US commuters and actual commuting and housing choices. Household commuting decisions are analyzed together with housing...
Article
Non-motorized forms of commuting include bicycling, walking to work and working at home and have the potential for reducing environmental damage. These non-motorized modes are analyzed empirically using US journey to work data. Higher salary income and more expensive housing are associated with greater propensity to work at home, but lower propensi...
Article
Full-text available
Cities in transitional economies are experiencing a proliferation of newly constructed suburban shopping malls. Curiously, travel habits to these new malls are quite distinct from those generally experienced in North America, particularly regarding trip chaining. While most weekday afternoon mall trips in developed nations are chained, few are link...
Article
Cities in transitional economies are experiencing a proliferation of newly constructed suburban shopping malls. Curiously, travel habits to these new malls are quite distinct from those generally experienced in North America, particularly regarding trip chaining. While most weekday afternoon mall trips in developed nations are chained, few are link...
Article
There has been a sharp increase in the share of sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and other light trucks in the US vehicle fleet. The characteristics of SUV and light-truck commuters are analyzed using the journey-to-work data from the American Housing Survey, and these are compared with car commuters. It is seen that SUV-truck commuters have slightly...
Article
Housing Savings Plans (HSP) are contractual savings products in which a household is granted a mortgage at preferential terms (or option for such) in exchange for accumulating savings in the plan and in the institution offering it. As such, they represent a bundle of savings and borrowing financial services. While such plans are common in some coun...
Article
The paper focuses on the socioeconomic characteristics of workers at home and those who walk to work and these are compared with commuters (those who travel to work by motorized transportation). Understanding of such characteristics of these people is useful for purposes of designing policies that encourage these forms of "travel" to work, if it is...
Article
Full-text available
The rapid transformation in both the location and type of retail provision in the Prague metropolitan area, Czech Republic, between 1997 and 2001 offers a unique opportunity for examining the relationship between land use and shopping travel behavior. The case of Prague is unique. Although the Czech capital has the compact form and transit-rich env...
Article
Abstract Bundling of products or features is a familiar phenomenon and has been studied and modeled in industrial organization models, consumer theory and marketing. Using a survey of housing preferences for American households, this study examines consumer preferences for ''all- inclusive'' bundles of amenities and features in housing versus the '...
Article
Bicycling to work, walking to work, and working at home are the main forms of non-motorized "commuting". To date, there have been relatively few analyses of the factors that affect the inclination to use these modes as opposed to motorized commuting. Here these non-motorized modes are analyzed empirically for the United States and Israel. These two...
Article
Full-text available
While suburbanization and decentralization are familiar concepts in urban economics, there is a possibility that land gradients will not simply flatten over time, but actually invert themselves. This would mean that the traditional CBD or downtown ceases to act as the pinnacle or nucleus of the land/housing pricing function within the metropolitan...
Conference Paper
Warehousing plays a central role in the transportation system, especially in freight transport. Previous literature on warehousing and transportation connections has concentrated on logistics problems, inventory management, and location choice. However, warehousing also plays a role in the larger transportation system and may be an indicator of the...
Article
Full-text available
In recent years ‘sustainability’ has become an important issue in policy discussion and decision making, especially with regard to transportation. Here the role of ‘sustainability’ and the forms of its incorporation into transportation policy is surveyed and compared for Israel, the Netherlands and the U.K. In particular, comparisons are made and d...
Article
Mobile-source emissions represent a large portion of all air pollutants, especially in urban areas. While there exist many forms of vehicle emissions abatement policies and others have been proposed, formal measures and methods for assessing the relative efficiency and effectiveness of these alternatives are needed. This is particularly the case gi...
Article
The monocenter model of urban metropolitan areas has come under increasing criticism in recent years. Many urban areas are in fact multicentered. This paper describes a methodology for identifying and ranking the multiple “centers” of a metropolitan area by inferring them from real estate price data. The method generalizes from previous methodologi...
Article
Relationships between transportation and communications have generally been analyzed at the household level. Yet most transportation and communications services are used by industry. This paper examines the relationship between uses of transportation and communications services by industry in the countries of the European Community. It is shown tha...
Article
Full-text available
In this study we are documenting and comparing the economic and travel impacts of bypass roads in the United States and Israel on the towns near which they are constructed. Using historical research, on-site observations, interviews, surveys, and data analyses we consider the effects of bypasses on local and through traffic, travel patterns, develo...

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