A Case Study of a 15-Minute City Concept in Singapore’s 2040 Land Transport Master Plan: 20-Minute Towns and a 45-Minute City

The 15-Minute city concept emerged as a response to the hyper-motorized city. First popularized by the Mayor of Paris in 2020, 15-Minute City is an evolving concept that derived from its predecessors such as neighborhood-unit planning and walkable city. This paper explores the implementation of the 15-Minute City concept in city planning by using Singapore as the case study. In 2018, Singapore released its Land Transport Master Plan 2040 and which includes an ambitious concept of 20-Minute Towns and a 45-Minute City (2MT45MC) and has similar ideas to the 15-Minute City concept. Through various journal articles and media coverage, Singapore’s policy and regulation regarding its transport planning were thoroughly reviewed to find Singapore’s strategy and challenges in realizing the objective of its 2MT45MC concept. Normalizing active mobility and enhancing connectivity nationwide are the main strategies to overcome the biggest challenges faced: lack of legal backing in personal mobility devices and the country’s rigid zoning. Even though it is too early to say whether 2MT45MC is achievable or not, projects such as the North-South Corridor show that for a long-term plan, it seems feasible.

ASSESSMENT OF URBAN ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY: A CASE STUDY OF CASABLANCA, MOROCCO

By 2050, Most of the world’s population will live in cities, this demographic explosion will lead to significant urban development at the expanse of natural land which may harm the environmental quality. Consequently, assessing and modeling the urban environmental quality (UEQ) is requisite for efficient urban sprawl control and better city planning and management. The present study proposes a methodology to model and assess the environment of the urban system by developing the urban environmental quality index (UEQI) based on remote sensing data. Five environmental indicators were derived from the Landsat OLI image namely, Modified Normalized Difference Impervious Surface Index (MNDISI), Modified Normalized Difference, Water Index (MNDWI), Normalized difference vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized difference built-up Index (NDBI) and Soil adjusted vegetation index (SAVI). Using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) the urban environmental quality index was computed for the 17 communes of Casablanca city. The UEQI values were spatially mapped under three classes (good, moderate, and poor). The results obtained from the analysis showed a significant difference in the term of UEQI values among the communes. In addition, the environmental quality is inadequate in communes with fewer green spaces and more impervious surfaces. The outcomes of this work can serve as an efficient tool to determine the most critical interventions to be made by the authority for current and future urban planning and land/resource management.

Semantic City Planning Systems (SCPS): A Literature Review

This review focuses on recent research literature on the use of Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) in city planning. The review foregrounds representational, evaluative, projective, and synthetical meta-practices as constituent practices of city planning. We structure our review around these four meta-practices that we consider fundamental to those processes. We find that significant research exists in all four metapractices. Linking across domains by combining various methods of semantic knowledge generation, processing, and management is necessary to bridge gaps between these meta-practices and will enable future Semantic City Planning Systems.

Durable Civic Technology

Minecraft is a video game that allows players to interact with a 3D environment. Launched in 2009, Minecraft has surprisingly durable popularity. Users report that Minecraft is easy to learn and understand, engaging and immersive, and adaptable. Outside North America it has been piloted for urban planning public consultation processes. Five years ago, authors conducted research using key informant interviews. This study asked practicing urban planners in Canada to assess Minecraft's potential. Key findings address Minecraft's usefulness as a visualization tool, its role in building public trust in local planning processes, the place of play in planning, and the challenges associated with its use in public consultation. This chapter explores Minecraft's ongoing use, offers reflections as to how this game could effectively be used for public consultation, and concludes with key lessons for urban planners whose practice intersects with our digitally-enabled world, with a particular focus on new application possibilities in smart city planning projects.

Parking Requirement of Institutional Land Use

Parking demand rates are one of the essential keys to urban city planning around the world. Most cities produced the most suitable parking rates, and models relied on their local conditions, regulations, and people’s habits. In Iraq, there is a lack of parking studies, and therefore, there is a lot of missing information which if be found, will be very valuable for better enhancing and managing the transportation network system. Institutional land use or Government Ministries are the land use type in which this research tries to find its parking generation rates. The goal is to produce models and rates for parking generation by using certain independent variables according to the characteristics of the land-use type. The research study area is the urban areas outside Baghdad CBD. Several sites were selected located in different parts of Baghdad. The number of study sites is three. The collected data about sites are the total number of site employees, site gross floor area, and maximum parked vehicles at each site for an Am and Pm period. Each site has a clear parking lot; besides, the sites were selected relied on particular criteria. The field survey was done at each site for defining days and times. The final stage is a data analysis and producing parking generation rates and models to determine the required parking demand for this land-use type. Statistical analysis of data, model generation, was done by the computer program (SPSS). It concluded that the institutional land use produced 0.94 spaces per 100 m2 of GFA and 0.1 spaces per employee.

Commuter Mobility Patterns in Social Media: Correlating Twitter and LODES Data

The Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) are an important city planning resource in the USA. However, curating these statistics is resource-intensive, and their accuracy deteriorates when changes in population and urban structures lead to shifts in commuter patterns. Our study area is the San Francisco Bay area, and it has seen rapid population growth over the past years, which makes frequent updates to LODES or the availability of an appropriate substitute desirable. In this paper, we derive mobility flows from a set of over 40 million georeferenced tweets of the study area and compare them with LODES data. These tweets are publicly available and offer fine spatial and temporal resolution. Based on an exploratory analysis of the Twitter data, we pose research questions addressing different aspects of the integration of LODES and Twitter data. Furthermore, we develop methods for their comparative analysis on different spatial scales: at the county, census tract, census block, and individual street segment level. We thereby show that Twitter data can be used to approximate LODES on the county level and on the street segment level, but it also contains information about non-commuting-related regular travel. Leveraging Twitter’s high temporal resolution, we also show how factors like rush hour times and weekends impact mobility. We discuss the merits and shortcomings of the different methods for use in urban planning and close with directions for future research avenues.

Guiding Principles in The Study of Neighborhoods as a Basis for the city Formation and Its Development "Homs city as a case of study": المبادئ التوجيهية في دراسة المجاورات السكنية كأساس لتشكيل المدينة وتطوّرها "مدينة حمص كحالة دراسية"

The city has grown and developed with time over several eras, and at each stage different concepts were defined in city planning, such as the residential neighborhood theory that Berry identified and considered it as the smallest planning unit that contributes to the formation of the city. The concepts of residential neighborhood have developed by a number of planners and have social, economic and urban dimensions. It is essential that it cannot be ignored when developing any plan for neighborhoods or cities, but these dimensions have differed between countries and planners, and it was necessary to set some guidelines in their planning as a primary goal to show their role in the formation of cities as the smallest component in the city formation in order to avoid the many problems In the processes of urban, population and economic development in general. From this logic, the research dealt with a theoretical and analytical study of the theoretical concepts of residential neighborhoods for some planners and identifying the elements of residential neighborhoods and their basic components in order to reach an analytical approach to assess residential neighborhoods and determine the guidelines for their study. Then, some international, Arab and local experiences were studied according to those principles in order to draw some important results, and project them to the city of Homs to demonstrate the importance and role of residential neighborhoods as a basis for the formation and development of residential neighborhoods and cities. The guidelines necessary to be available in the study of residential neighborhoods were deduced, and by conducting a comparative approach between the research experiences, it was noted that the environmental and regional dimension was provided in most by 100%, as well as the availability of the appropriate radius by 90%, except that there are bicycles and pedestrians paths and the movement of people with special needs was 10% which needs to be developed and improved. The research recommends adoption the concluded guidelines because they include all urban and planning aspects and meet the resident social and economic needs and thus contribute to the city formation (urban, economic and social). The research also recommends following a basic idea in the study of the neighborhood so that it achieves the possibility of dividing it into residential groups that contain service centers according to radii suitable for the movement of the population on foot (between 400- 500 m) with securing an area for regional or city services, and attention to sustainability and the provision of the green element. And work to limit the movement of pedestrians according to special paths, taking into account the movement of people with special needs, and securing the necessary site coordination elements.