LIVING STANDARD, QUALITY OF LIFE IN NORTH-EAST HUNGARY BASED ON A SURVEY

living standard, quality of life, liveability, North-East Hungary, regional differences, questionnaire surveyliving standard, quality of life, liveability, North-East Hungary, regional differences, questionnaire survey, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Labor and Human Capital,

An experimental determination of perceived liveability in Sydney

Liveability is a concept and factor being used by urban planners and designers to better understand how people perceive the places they live and work in and how it affects their life choices. Existing normative liveability indices are based on measurable and reproducible factors. They aim to objectively compare various residential conditions and their evolution. However, better understanding decisional processes attached to transport or residential choices necessitates a more dynamic approach. The concept of perceived liveability addresses the subjective nature of individual assessments of local environmental conditions. First, we have developed an empirical model based on subjective ranking and evaluation of six environmental factors. Then, we have conducted a pilot Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) survey in Sydney to inform our empirical model. Finally, a linear additive model was fitted to the survey data in order to represent various levels of satisfaction based on residential and socio-demographic conditions. (Résumé d'auteur

Research report 22: liveability in NDC areas: findings from six case studies

New Deal for Communities (NDC) is a key programme in the Government's strategy to tackle multiple deprivation by giving some of the poorest communities in the UK the resources to tackle their problems in an intensive and co-ordinated way. The programme, which began in 1998, has encouraged the development of partnerships between local people, community and voluntary organisations, public agencies, local authorities and business. These partnerships are working to tackle the problems of social exclusion and make a lasting improvement to their neighbourhood, with the active involvement of the local community. While different areas face different problems, the five main issues to be tackled by NDC partnerships are: worklessness; improving health; tackling crime; raising educational achievement; and housing and the physical environment. Sustainable Cities Research Institute is part of a national consortium carrying out the evaluation of NDC. The evaluation is led by Sheffield Hallam University and involves 14 UK research centres, universities, and private consultancy firms. Sustainable Cities staff involved with this work are Keith Shaw, who is the North East Region Co-ordinator (with responsibility for Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Newcastle and Sunderland partnerships), and Gill Davidson, who is carrying out evaluation tasks in Middlesbrough. Also involved in this work at a regional level are staff members from the University's School of Politics, and from the University of Newcastle. The evaluation began with a scoping phase in October 2001. The evaluation is expected to continue in its current format until at least 2005, with annual evaluation reports being produced in 2003, 2004, and 2005. Sustainable Cities is also undertaking research for a series of case studies focusing on West Middlesbrough NDC; so far these have covered subjects including mainstreaming, involving hard-to-reach young people in regeneration, and liveability

MaaSim: A Liveability Simulation for Improving the Quality of Life in Cities

Urbanism is no longer planned on paper thanks to powerful models and 3D simulation platforms. However, current work is not open to the public and lacks an optimisation agent that could help in decision making. This paper describes the creation of an open-source simulation based on an existing Dutch liveability score with a built-in AI module. Features are selected using feature engineering and Random Forests. Then, a modified scoring function is built based on the former liveability classes. The score is predicted using Random Forest for regression and achieved a recall of 0.83 with 10-fold cross-validation. Afterwards, Exploratory Factor Analysis is applied to select the actions present in the model. The resulting indicators are divided into 5 groups, and 12 actions are generated. The performance of four optimisation algorithms is compared, namely NSGA-II, PAES, SPEA2 and eps-MOEA, on three established criteria of quality: cardinality, the spread of the solutions, spacing, and the resulting score and number of turns. Although all four algorithms show different strengths, eps-MOEA is selected to be the most suitable for this problem. Ultimately, the simulation incorporates the model and the selected AI module in a GUI written in the Kivy framework for Python. Tests performed on users show positive responses and encourage further initiatives towards joining technology and public applications.Comment: 16 page

Evolution of mobility governance in Flanders: opening up for bottom-up initiatives or suffering from lock-in?

Mobility policy in Flanders lacks a clear discourse on implementing the policy objectives for 2020 and beyond. Though mobility planning can show success stories, mobility problems seem to aggravate. For supra local mobility projects in Flanders the executive power often lies with deconcentrated administrations at the level of the province, this is e.g. the case for public transportation and major roads, where province boundaries impede public transport projects across borders. For local mobility plans, the local administration and council have the power. But as these local mobility plans have highly formalised procedures, they tend to be rigid frameworks or administrations and risk to be suffering from lock-in. There is a need for new dynamics in mobility policy in reference to present developments. Here bottom-up or outside-in initiatives can be regarded as the key to real change. To that end radical changes in the organisation and mobility planning itself are necessary to meet these new inititiaves from the bottum-up and outside-in. Next to hardware and software approaches or innovations to turn mobility planning more sustainable, we additionally propose in this paper an ‘orgware’ solution, demonstrated in some case studies. In these cases key actors of bottom-up projects and their associations with other actors are visualised. Furthermore barriers and potentials for implementation are formulated leading onto recommendations for further research in order to improve the implementation of the policy objectives

Linking urban form to a liveable city

This paper intends to show the contribution and relationship of urban form to a liveable city, as many researchers pose the urban form as one of the factors that can worsen or improve the sustainability of the city. The paper will begin by exploring into the theoretical characteristics of the urban form at the macro and micro scale. Urban form models that match the Malaysian cities’ urban form are illustrated in this paper with the idea of giving a larger context of the living ecology for Malaysian communities. There are two types of cities, one that grows in an ad-hoc manner, and the other is being shaped by planners. This paper however, focuses only on a planned city that is the core city for Shah Alam. Consequently, this paper touches briefly on the liveable city concept which is currently being debated among the researchers as a more practical way of looking into the sustainable city issues. The liveable city framework for the city of Shah Alam is discussed and some preliminary findings are offered at the end of the pape

Communities of Co-presence and Surveillance: how public open space shapes awareness and behaviour in residential developments

12-15 June 200

An Agent Based Model for the Simulation of Transport Demand and Land Use

Agent based modelling has emerged as a promising tool to provide planners with insights on social behaviour and the interdependencies characterising urban system, particularly with respect to transport and infrastructure planning. This paper presents an agent based model for the simulation of land use and transport demand of an urban area of Sydney, Australia. Each individual in the model has a travel diary which comprises a sequence of trips the person makes in a representative day as well as trip attributes such as travel mode, trip purpose, and departure time. Individuals are associated with each other by their household relationship, which helps define the interdependencies of their travel diary and constrains their mode choice. This allows the model to not only realistically reproduce how the current population uses existing transport infrastructure but more importantly provide comprehensive insight into future transport demands. The router of the traffic micro-simulator TRANSIMS is incorporated in the model to inform the actual travel time of each trip and changes of traffic density on the road network. Simulation results show very good agreement with survey data in terms of the distribution of trips done by transport modes and by trip purposes, as well as the traffic density along the main road in the study area