Wiki-Planning

Today, 2.0 information technologies undoubtedly represent the most important media. The main innovation is the transition from a one-way approach where citizens are only informed, to a two-way approach where citizens can express their opinion in a wiki-way, where a strong interaction among citizens can lead to a production of important ideas and opinions substantially influencing choices. Great part of planning documents are produced adopting hidden agendas, favouritisms, unclear agreements, ambiguous administrative acts; thus, citizens are not able to find a suitable location to denounce responsibilities and to seek for remedies. Generally, citizens do not believe in participatory activities, because they have poor trust in institutions, especially in this period; they suppose that decisions have been already taken before a meeting. The typical approach to participation generally can be located at the lower levels of Arnstein Ladder. In this field, social platforms played a crucial role in the experience of Basento park in Potenza (Basilicata, southern Italy). Starting from a project designed by architects and engineers, Facebook and Twitter blogs were the means to discuss among citizens and between citizens and administrator in order to improve the project and to better explain its basic idea.

Cultural Heritage Management at the Local Level

In a virtual space conveniently chosen, citizens of the Web can interact and develop social capital and empowerment, intended as the consciousness of possibilities to influence the social context and to improve it, by increasing capacity of taking reasoned decisions on problems and of adopting adequate behaviour to face them. The Web can be seen in this sense as an innovative decisional system where it is possible to activate processes of electronic governance (e-governance) to make notions and expectations appear for a self-promoted and self-sustained local development. From this basis, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei has taken part to the research project ISAAC (Integrated e-Services for Advanced Access to Heritage in Cultural Tourist Destinations)1, with the objective of designing, experiencing, and testing innovative forms of participation by taking advantage of the potential of the New Technologies for Information and Communication (NTIC) to support and promote e-governance processes.

Integration of Satellite Remote Sensing Techniques and Landscape Metrics to Characterize Land Cover Change and Dynamics

One of the most relevant applications of Remote Sensing (RS) techniques is related to the analysis and the characterization of Land Cover (LC) and its change, very useful to efficiently undertake land planning and management policies. Here, a case study is described, conducted in the area of Avellino (Southern Italy) by means of RS in combination with GIS and landscape metrics. A multi-temporal dataset of RS imagery has been used: aerial photos (1954, 1974, 1990), Landsat images (MSS 1975, TM 1985 and 1993, ETM+ 2004), and digital orthophotos (1994 and 2006). To characterize the dynamics of changes during a fifty year period (1954-2004), the approach has integrated temporal trend analysis and landscape metrics, focusing on the urban-rural gradient. Aerial photos and satellite images have been classified to obtain maps of LC changes, for fixed intervals: 1954-1985 and 1985-2004. LC pattern and its change are linked to both natural and social processes, whose driving role has been clearly demonstrated in the case analysed. In fact, after the disastrous Irpinia earthquake (1980), the local specific zoning laws and urban plans have significantly addressed landscape changes.

Indicators of Land Degradation Vulnerability Due to Anthropic Factors

Land degradation is one of the most impacting phenomena on natural resource availability, both in quantitative and qualitative terms. In order to provide efficient tools for territorial sustainable management in areas affected by land degradation, it is important to define suitable models and indicators able to identify exposed areas and their vulnerability level, so as to provide an effective support for decision makers in identifying intervention priorities and planning mitigation/adaptation strategies. This work is focused on the evaluation at high spatial detail of land degradation vulnerability due to anthropic factors, which is a crucial issue in areas devoted to farming practices. Vulnerability is evaluated by integrating a new indicator of the mechanization level the authors recently developed, with a set of census based indicators of land management. The new indicator is independent of census data being based on land cover data; thus, it can provide a better spatial characterization and a more frequent updating compared to commonly adopted indices that are evaluated at municipal scale. By analyzing data for the whole Southern Italy, such an indicator was integrated for the first time at full spatial resolution to obtain a final vulnerability index of land management. This comprehensive index enabled a more accurate estimation of the land degradation vulnerability due to anthropic factors allowing the discrimination of priority areas within the municipal areas.

Studies of Accessibility to Healthcare in Canada

The main goal of this chapter is to provide a theoretical background for accessibility studies as a sub-discipline of health geography and a literature review on the topic. The chapter provides various definitions of accessibility, its major characteristics and comparison between main measuring techniques. The influence of accessibility on population health is also discussed. An overview of recent accessibility studies in Canada is provided and future directions of research are discussed. A case study is provided to illustrate one of the advanced methods in measuring access.

Urban Environment Quality in the Italian Spatial Data Infrastructure

Public access to environmental information is granted by international law. The European Community has established an Infrastructure for Spatial Information (INSPIRE) in order to provide data and information to effected environmental policies. ISPRA coordinates the Italian Environmental Information and Monitoring System (SINA) and represents the national Inspire coordination structure. Moreover, ISPRA disseminates environmental information through reports, on-line services, and WebGis. Recently, a new WebGis has been developed to provide public access to environmental indicators data contained in the annual report on urban environment quality. Soil, water and air quality, waste, industrial risk, transport and mobility, acoustic and electromagnetic pollution, nature and biodiversity, tourism, and energy were analysed in 34 urban areas. The WebGis provides simple and powerful tools to analyze environmental dynamics of urban areas promoting participatory planning. It was designed to easily access and select the indicators data and to represent their spatial and temporal distribution.

Seeking for Connections among Real Estate Economy, Social Value, and Identity inside the Districts of Manhattan

The chapter tells about a procedure for investigating the coherence of the relationship between a “wide” mean of distance and the geography of real estate value. Many authors consider that real estate value can depend on distance from some reference point, and its variation can be linear. Such conviction leads to the use of geostatistical approaches based on kriging techniques. At the same time, the literature teaches that the market shows a higher value where several amenities are coexisting. But in those urban realities where the number of central points and the number of amenities is high, the complexity does not support the construction of models, and this complexity leads to a different concept of identity as synthesis of distance, borders, and concentration. The use of fuzzy cluster can support the analysis. This chapter gives a brief example about how this works in the case of New York core.

Reinforcing the Place of Dynamic Spatialised Indicators in a Generic Socioeconomic Model

This chapter describes and discusses a work aiming to contribute to how dynamic sustainable development indicators may be spatially represented in a generic spatial-integrated socioeconomic model (SISM). It means that, at a socioeconomic level, the resulting SISM should be capable of supporting applications modelled at different territorial scales and, at a spatial level, the SISM should be capable (a) of spatially representing the temporal evolution of the indicators by itself and (b) of exporting, at any time during a SISM simulation, the temporal evolution of the spatial state of the model as a (new) map exploitable in a GIS tool. The proposal from this chapter is to design a generic object-based SISM resulting from a combination of a multi-agent model and an object-based version of a system dynamics model so that all selected indicators can be spatialised via shaped objects independently of the territory study and the modelling approach.

A GIS Implementation of a Model of Systemic Vulnerability Assessment in Urbanized Areas Exposed to Combined Risk of Landslide and Flood

This chapter aims to analyze the systemic vulnerability of a complex urban area when a combined flood-landslide event occurs. The proposed approach of vulnerability evaluation differs from traditional methods as it provides an analysis of “systemic vulnerability” measuring the relationship between extreme event magnitude and the direct and indirect consequences of this event on the territorial system. GIS technology has been introduced for the proposed systemic vulnerability assessment because it allows the implementation of the spatially and thematically distributed models used. The software also allows the automated application of the method by creating a model that processes, analyzes, and displays data in the form of maps. The model proposed was shown to be able to support the territorial planning and the appropriate management of an emergency due to natural catastrophes such as floods and landslides. The priority intervention elements can be defined as those with higher values of integrity and functionality (the most efficient rescue units) and the elements which need intervention are most affected by systemic vulnerability (the most damaged nodes).

Can Long-Distance Rail Accessibility Affect the Real Estate Market?

Most studies present in the literature have analyzed local transit networks and their impacts on land values. Empirical studies of the effects of long-distance rail accessibility on real estate prices are relatively rare. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link in England is presented as an example of such impacts. Hedonic price theory is used to estimate the implicit price of each dependent attribute. Ad hoc catchment and control areas have been defined around the St Pancras High Speed station. The main outcome of this analysis is that access to High Speed Rail has an impact on residential property prices, while, with increasing distance from the station, other attributes affect residential property prices.