Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1987.

The purpose of this report is to measure the effect of isolation on neighbourliness in fringe communities. Isolation is defined as a result of location and inadequate transportation. It is suggested that the location of a community can influence social behavior among residents in three ways: (1) By influencing the physical community characteristics which could influence social behavior. (2) By selecting a residential population with a particular pattern of behavior. (3) By influencing the spatial and temporal patterns of behavior among fringe residents. A measurement of this last factor will be the topic of the report. Time, distance and transportation limit the fringe resident in the selection of his social relationships. The commuter appears to participate more in the activities of the central city or its satellites than in the activities of the dormitory community. The non-commuter, on the other hand, is more likely to take part in the activities in the residential environment. The thesis to be tested in this study is; that neighbourliness among non-commuting housewives will increase with the isolation of the residential community. This thesis is based on the following assumptions: (1) That, the isolation of a fringe community increases the probability of social contact among non-commuting residents by reducing the opportunity for selecting relationships on the basis of personal predispositions and increasing the opportunity for relationships based on convenience. (2) That, the degree of neighbourliness will increase with the probability of social contact among fringe residents. In order to test these propositions, neighbourliness is studied among the residents of 11 fringe communities and 3 urban control communities in the Greater Vancouver Area. Neighbourliness among residents is measured in terms of the percentage of informants visiting their neighbours often. The degree of isolation of a community has been measured in terms of the distances toward selected destinations which are assumed to be of daily importance to the fringe housewife and in terms of the distance to the nearest bus stop and the frequency of bus services. These measures of location are combined in a ranking scale, obtained by attaching a numerical value to the evaluations Good (0), Fair (6 1/4) and Poor (12 1/2). The highest possible isolation score would be 100, representing a 'poor' evaluation for each of the 8 measures used. The actual test consists of comparing the percentage of people that visit their neighbours often with the isolation score of their community, obtained as described above. In addition to this measure of locational factors, a measure of non-locational determinants of neighbourliness was made. The possible influence of physical community characteristics, differences in services and facilities, size and age of communities and length of stay were evaluated. The characteristics of all informants that visit their neighbours often is compared with the characteristics of those that do not, in order to establish the influence of household characteristics such as household composition and children's age groups, and social and economic characteristics such as differences in occupational and income classes. The result of the test comparison shows a rough correlation between the isolation scores and the neighbourliness scores, in the sense that communities with a low isolation score tend to have low neighbourliness percentages and those with a high degree of isolation tend to have higher neighbourliness scores. Yet, there are significant anomalies which preclude a clear conclusion whether location does or does not influence neighbourliness among fringe residents. On the other hand, some of the control tests on non-locational influences reveal some interesting information which seems to validate the propositions made in this study. It appears that housewives without private means of transportation during the day-time and housewives who have the care of young children under 5 years of age are more neighbourly than those who have the use of a car and have older children. In addition it was found that housewives who are occupied at home are more neighbourly than those working away from home. These factors seem to indicate that there are non-locational factors that seem to 'isolate' the housewife from regular contacts with the outside world. In addition to these household characteristics, the length of stay and occupational class were found to be related to neighbourliness. These findings would suggest that the most obvious explanation of a high incidence of neighbourliness in the fringe has to be sought in the selection of a particular fringe population with characteristics conducive to neighbourliness. However, this does not preclude the possibility of locational influences on neighbourliness. It is suggested that the influence of location is of a rather subtle and complex nature, so that substantially more information has to be obtained on the demand for movement among various categories of people before meaningful measurements can be made on the extent to which ecological position influences the movement of people. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between residents' leisure activities and their physical environment as an aid to understanding their satisfaction with that environment. This is done with specific reference to Maple Ridge, a fringe area of Vancouver. Three major questions are considered. How do the characteristics of the residents affect the frequency of their participation in various leisure, activities? To what extent does the environment constrain or facilitate activities which the residents have an interest in pursuing? And, to what extent does participation in activities which are facilitated or constrained by the environment influence residents1 satisfaction with that environment? Ten hypotheses and two assumptions were formulated to examine the relationships suggested by these questions. The study data consists of 152 responses to a mailed questionnaire which was distributed to a random sample of the residents of Maple Ridge. Univariate techniques for comparing percentage differences, means and correlations, and the multivariate techniques of factor analysis, Hotelling's T² statistic and discriminant analysis are used to test the hypotheses. It is shown that the residents who were most interested and participated most frequently in rural related activities preferred a more rural environment; whereas, there is some indication that those who participated less frequently in such activities preferred a more urban environment. For planners, the results of this study imply that it is valid to examine residential location on the basis of the residents' leisure activities and that the fringe should be recognized as an area offering unique residential opportunities within the metropolitan area. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate

published_or_final_version / Geography and Geology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (M.S. in landscape architecture)--Washington State University, December 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-78).

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2009. / Vita. Appendices: leaves 132-141. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-152). Also available on microfilm.

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1985 J635 / Master of Landscape Architecture

There are extensive empirical studies on the impacts and effectiveness of Smart Growth policies; however, very few of them consider the perspective of individual decision makers and, to this author's knowledge, none have studied developers as location-aware decision-making agents. This study tries to fill this gap partially by assessing the impacts of Portland's smart growth policies on developers' location choice behavior with developer-based location choice models. The dissertation has two purposes. By assessing the impacts of Smart Growth policies on individual home developer's location choice, it provides a micro- and behavioral foundation for the understanding of Smart Growth policies. As a bi-state metropolitan area located on the border between Oregon and Washington, the Portland region provides a unique environment that allows my research to examine whether home developers react to Smart Growth policies differently in the two states with different land use policy systems. The dissertation also aims to create a developer-based land development forecast model, which can be used as a scenario analysis tool for the Portland region's long-term land use and transportation planning. Besides the developer location choice model mentioned above, the components of this comprehensive developer-based land development model also include a time series regression model that predicts annual new housing supply in the region and a model that synthesizes housing projects in a forecast year. The study shows that home developers in the Portland metropolitan area are sensitive to most Smart Growth policies that have been implemented in the region, but they react to them differently across the border between Oregon and Washington. Single-family home (SFH) and multi-family home (MFH) developers show different preferences for location attributes. The most significant predictors of where a developer will choose to locate a project are the locations of previous projects. After controlling for all of the other factors discussed above, there remains a strong preference for developing SFH units outside of the UGB in both Oregon and Washington sides of the Portland metropolitan area. Latent class models have been developed to detect taste variations among home developers in the SFH and MFH markets separately. Estimation results show clear taste variations across developers and housing projects with respect to site attributes in their location choice. With other variables in the segmentation model being the same, project size provides a better fit to the data than developer size, indicating that developers have taste variations among their different projects. Large size SFH projects developed by contractor-owners are more likely to be within the UGB and their locations tend to have higher residential density, housing diversity, transportation accessibility, road density, and land price. With most MFH projects within the UGB, estimation results show that large size MFH projects prefer the locations with higher residential density, housing diversity, mixed use, road density, land price, average household income, and proportion of young and middle age households. The three-step new housing supply and location choice forecast model seem to be able to capture the basic trend of housing market and land development in the Portland region. Three different aggregate housing supply forecast models, an conditional time series regressive model, a unconditional time series regression model, and an auto-regression integrated moving average (ARIMA) model were tested and their advantages and disadvantages were discussed. Both the SFH and MFH project synthesis models can simulate housing projects well for a forecast year. Three location choice models were developed to allocate synthesized housing projects into space. The three models are characterized separately as: (1) assumed market homogeneity and atomization of development projects; (2) deterministic market segmentation and synthesis of projects by size; and (3) probabilistic market segmentation and synthesis of projects by size, using a latent class approach. Examination of forecast results shows that all three models can successfully capture the basic spatial pattern of housing development in the region; however, the spatial distribution of MFH development is lumpier and more unpredictable. While Models 2 and 3 are more sophisticated and make more sense from a theoretical perspective, they do not return better forecast results than Model 1 due to some practical issues. Models 2 and 3 would be expected to perform better when those practical issues are solved, at least partially, in future research.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (M.Sc.U.R.P.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2000.