ABSTRACT: This dissertation extends research that seeks a better understanding of the complex relationships between humans and the urban environment by focusing on one of the more pervasive topics in recent human-environment studies- the investigation and analysis of the connections between transportation and land-use. Currently, the multitude of environmental, economic, and social-welfare concerns incumbent to a society dependent on the automobile have compounded the need to further understand and develop models of these connections. By conceptualizing the urban environment as the locations of housing and the locations of jobs, or urban structure, this dissertation builds upon previous research that utilizes urban commuting to explore connections between transportation and land-use in US metropolitan regions. Motivated by the prospects of providing new insights into the relationship between commuting, sprawl, sustainability and the urban structure; this dissertation develops a methodology to assess and evaluate changes to the urban structure over time by synthesizing elements from both the planning and geographic literatures. The Model of Urban Structure and Evaluation of Change (MUSEC) presented in chapter 6 proposes that for a given city or region, changes to the urban structure can be modeled using homogenous data to model the urban structure and evaluated using the commuting carrying capacity to assess the changes. To better support those assumptions, two analytical chapters are presented exploring the role of homogenous data in commute studies (chapter 4) and the role of the commuting carrying capacity in urban structure assessment (chapter 5). The ability to assess urban structure changes will help broaden the understanding of the transportation/land-use connection and can provide planners, government officials, and geographers' knowledge to address prevalent urban issues such as sprawl and sustainable development.

Describes the characteristics of a wide variety of rodents--mice, rats, squirrels, marmots, prairie dogs, lemmings, beavers, and others--and discusses their suitability as pets.

This book is thematically positioned at the intersections of Urban Design, Architecture, Civil Engineering and Computer Science, and it has the goal to provide specialists coming from respective fields a multi-angle overview of state-of-the-art work currently being carried out. It addresses both newcomers who wish to obtain more knowledge about this growing area of interest, as well as established researchers and practitioners who want to keep up to date. In terms of organization, the volume starts out with chapters looking at the domain at a wide-angle and then moves focus towards technical viewpoints and approaches.

Urban models can be divided into explanatory or policy-oriented classifications. Explanatory models are usually systematic attempts at explaining urban form; operational models, on the other hand, rely on either social physics or behavior principles. Explanatory models focus on the tradeoffs between the cost of the site itself and the costs of travel, the analytic problems caused by the unique quality of each location, the effects of transport congestion on city form, and the consequences of welfare emphasis on equity. The social physics form of operational models tries to replicate statistical regularities observed in the activities of people within a city. Economic models based on behavioral principles are the easiest to understand because their structure is drawn from behavioral relations derived from behavioral analysis. The characteristics of operational and explanatory models overlap. Two operational and two explanatory models are presented as exemplary techniques for modeling urban areas in developing countries. Useful explanatory models are likely to require large sets of disaggregated data in order to provide the building blocks for the operational models.

Examines the changing role of urban models in relation to urban well-being and planning problems and offers a `new geography of performance indicators' for the public and private sector based on principles of spatial interaction.

This book was first published in 1983.