A new phase of local planning began in the 1970s in the major English cities, as redevelopment of older residential areas began to give way to rehabilitation. This phase has not been intensively studied in the planning literature. This study seeks to assess the contribution of local planning to the processes of renewal in these inner residential areas, with a special interest in arrangements which may give residents of these areas better control over the outcomes. The research examines the factors which conditioned the approach to local planning in each city and each neighbourhood, with case studies of two neighbourhoods in Leeds and two in Manchester. At the citywide level Manchester council's form of Labour politics is seen as generally discouraging the use of local planning frameworks, with the retention of a more centralised council administration. Analysis of the joint operation of a wide range of factors is emphasised as necessary to understand the kinds of local planning adopted and the effects these had. In particular the variation present within each neighbourhood and in each case or episode is seen as significant in influencing local planning processes and outcomes. After 1974 there was less likelihood of even informal area frameworks being used, and greater tendencies towards ad hoc planning decisions on individual cases. It is concluded that extensive changes are needed to make local planning more responsive: changes particularly in the overall resourcing and programming context in which local planning operates, and in the procedures used within planning, above all those for involving local interests and in the way municipal administration is organised. The housing renewal system introduced in 1990 (with Renewal Areas) might, if suitably applied, help to facilitate such a form of more responsive local planning.

No description available.

The main purpose of this research is to develop a set of econometric Air-Rail competition models which are sufficiently sensitive to measure the effects upon demand of policy decisions, with regard to such variables as frequency of services and fares. Existing Modal Competition Models have, rather uncritically, applied Multiple Regression analysis in considering only one aspect of the market, namely the demand for travel, ignoring therefore the effects of the supply upon the demand. The emergence of the so called "Simultaneous Equations Bias", due to the two-way dependency between the demand and the level of service factor expressing the supply, renders the application of the 015 (Ordinary Least Squares) inappropriate, and hence, yields biased, inconsistent, and inefficient OLS coefficients. The models, developed in this study, depart from all existing Modal Competition Models, and overcome some of their drawbacks. They are formulated as Multi-equation Supply/Demand Modal Competition Models. They introduce the frequency of services variable not only in the demand, but also in the supply equation expressing the level of supply in response to changes in other variables. In order to derive unbiased, more conSistent, and more efficient coefficients, sophisticated statistical techniques, such as 2315 and JSLS (Two-Stage Least Squares and Three-Stage Least Squares) • are applied as a means of calibration. The elasticities obtained are consistent with the Supply and demand Microeconomic Theory. The frequency of services appears as the most powerful explanatory variable in Air demand; whereas fare and income are the most powerful variables in Rail demand equation. This leads to the conclusion that Air mode is mainly higher income groups and/or business oriented market; and Rail mode lower income groups and/or personal oriented market. Furthermore, Air and Rail are competing on a fare basis in short routes; while they do not show close substitutes for each other in longer ones. The high significance of the frequency of services, in Air demand, outlines its importance as a factor influencing the demand, and therefore, provides the Airlines management with the capability of improving the demand by acting upon the endogenous factor. This is of great interest in the scheduling fleet process. Similarly, the significance of Rail fare variable offers the Railways management the possibility of acting upon the demand through this controlable variable, for an efficient pricing policy. Rail journey time elasticities, derived from these models, are very close to the elasticities assumed by British Railways Board, in their Passenger Traffic Model, 1980. The statistical results indicate that the elasticities derived are useful for both analysis and forecasting purposes.

The effectiveness of the strategies employed by the Urban Wildlife Group (a voluntary conservation organisation) to provide and manage three urban nature parks has been evaluated, using a multiple methods methodology. Where the level of community interest and commitment to a project is high, the utilisation of the community nature park strategy (to maximise benefits to UWG and the community) is warranted. Where the level of interest and commitment of the local community is low, a strategy designed to encourage limited involvement of the community is most effective and efficient. The campaign strategy, whereby the community and UWG take direct action to oppose a threat of undesirable development on a nature park, is assessed to be a sub-strategy, rather than a strategy in its own right. Questionnaire surveys and observations studies have revealed that urban people appreciate and indeed demand access to nature parks in urban areas, which have similar amenity value to that provided by countryside recreation sites. Urban nature parks are valued for their natural character, natural features (trees, wild flowers) peace and quiet, wildlife and openness. People use these sites for a mixture of informal and mainly passive activities, such as walking and dog walking. They appear to be of particular value to children for physical and imaginative play. The exact input of time and resources that UWG has committed to the projects has depended on the level of input of the local authority. The evidence indicates that the necessary technical expertise needed to produce and manage urban nature parks, using a user-oriented approach is not adequately provided by local authorities. The methods used in this research are presented as an `evaluation kit' that may be used by practitioners and researchers to evaluate the effectiveness of a wide range of different open spaces and the strategies employed to provide and manage them.

Arrangements within the UK to enhance recreational opportunities in the countryside are currently implemented in a somewhat <I>ad hoc</I> manner. The result of this is that current arrangements for recreation provision may be ineffective in terms of institutional arrangements, efficiency of spending on access enhancement and equity of benefit distribution. It is these issues which are addressed in this thesis. To analyse the effectiveness of recreation provision, the current research develops and applies a number of economic and political science techniques to a case study of Grampian Region, Scotland. First, the research evaluates the economic effectiveness of current arrangements for recreation provision and identifies where additional investment may be required. It achieves this by evaluating the costs and benefits associated with recreation improvements in Grampian Region and analyses these using a cost-benefit framework. The economic benefits accrued from recreational enhancements are measured using the Contingent Valuation method, whereas the costs are elicited from a survey of the actual expenditures of countryside organisations. The findings from this analysis allow the identification of those improvements to recreation opportunities which generate the greatest gains in social welfare. In turn, the effectiveness of current arrangements is further analysed in terms of the distribution of benefits across individuals and locations. The second component of the research addresses the adequacy of current provision using political science methodologies to the analysis of the roles and responsibilities of the public and voluntary sector organisations involved in recreation provision. The application of political science models to interpret the processes involved in recreation decision-making provided clarity to the nature of the interactions between countryside organisations. The application of both economic and political science methodologies ensures a theoretical diverse and policy relevant analysis of current recreation provision. The combination of both approaches results in comprehensive review of priorities for improvement to recreation policy.

1) There is a growing awareness of the importance of accessibility as a determinant and conditioner of a variety of problems perceived in contemporary rural areas. 2) The 'rural transport problem1 is essentially social in character because it is possible to point to distinct social groups at particular localities that experience a differentially low level of personal mobility relative to the norms of contemporary society. 3) Rural society is not static in character but is at present experiencing three fundamental processes of social and demographic change. These condition the number, location, and individual perception, of people suffering the 'rural transport problem'. 4) There is a basic dichotomy between the stated rationale for' public intervention to solve the 'rural transport problem' and the way the policies have been implemented. This is shown to have arisen from a misconception of the relationship between the problem (consumer based) and the response (support supply) in the work of the Jack Committee in the early sixties. This dichotomy has been maintained. 5) There has been a general failure of both tiers of government to perceive the differences between the 'need' for transport and the 'demand' for transport and this has distorted the relationship between the objectives of public intervention and the social character of the problem on the one hand, and the nature of local policy implementation on the other. There is no method presently available, that can be attached to this procedure of implementation, that will allow the evaluation of the social returns of public financial intervention in this policy area. 6) An alternative process of implementation is advanced based upon three innovations in procedures; i) the use of a method of measuring comparative need as a device for identifying the transport needs of a community, ii) the use of spatial opportunity profiles to evaluate transport and fixed facility supply in meeting these needs, iii) the use of a process of operator tenders for defined service packages - defined by utilising the 'needs' criteria previously described. 7) The advantages of the reformulated procedure would be that; i) It directly implements and fulfills the stated objectives of public intervention in this policy area, ii) It gives social based criteria for the evaluation of the success of implementation - defining the nature, extent, and type of help given to those defined as in 'need', iii) It focuses local authority concerns solely upon the social rationale for intervention, iv) It allows bus operators to act commercially at all times.

The problems relating to transport and communications in large, sparsely populated areas are here examined in the context of the Highlands and Islands, north and west of the Great Glen. The concept of 'accessibility' is of particular importance. The work has two inter-related themes: the description, mainly in cartographic form, of regional patterns of accessibility within the Highlands and Islands, and also a comparative assessment of the practical value of the range of analytical techniques available for doing this. Due to the great size of the region, the bulk of the thesis is concerned with the regional, aggregate scale. Accessibility has a great variety of interpretations, and a physical rather than a behavioural view is taken here. A selection of elementary structural measures is applied, before resorting to the more complex procedures of network analysis. The former includes a survey of the coverage of the settlement pattern by transport services, and reveals a very high standard. The application of network analysis for high-resolution networks entails severe problems of definition and scale. A program is constructed for the manipulation of very large networks and a series of accessibility surfaces is generated; the degree of flexibility which the method proves to have must be appraised in the light of the computing problems encountered. Overall, fourteen accessibility indices are proposed in the thesis, and these reveal a fairly high degree of consensus on the spatial patterns of relative advantage within the region. To complement the main theme, a local scale study considers the concept of 'isolation' and suggests a methodology. In the Highlands, as in other rural areas, public transport must be seen in relation to the general issues of rural service provision and settlement policy.

No description available.

The planning and management of change has tended to be directed towards the achievement of end states. Adaptive procedures are generally undertaken when it is felt that these end states will not be reached and intervention is necessary. This intervention is usually determined by the technical and organizational criteria of the management system. This thesis argues, using the land-use planning system as a central example, that such an approach to change management fails to acknowledge the diversity of the process. Two points are considered to be fundamental to this argument. Firstly, that diversity is the generator of change, and not merely an inconvenient constraint upon its management Secondly, change follows multi-dimensional pathways (through time, across space, and between themes), that do not conform to technical, linear. management criteria. Failure to recognise these points inevitably hinders the ability of management systems to adapt to the uncertainty of the environment for which they have assumed responsibility. One measure of this failure is the mis-match between the agenda set by the managers of change, and that which is desired by the consumers of the process. The thesis supports the need for integrated management systems that are cognizant of, and driven by, the variety which is identified within the consumer agenda. The field work for the study considers ways of identifying the nature and extent of this variety. It will be argued that individuals interpret, negotiate, and effect change interactively with the wider social system. This interaction combines with the social and physical environments encountered by individuals in their daily lives, to define a 'sense of place'. A multi-method approach is developed which uses the demographic attributes of the . study village as bench marks that will allow comparison with other localities, and place it on an urban - rural continuum. This quantitative data also provides a means by which the variety of qualitative data can be assessed, and upon which provisional classifications about how particular groupings respond to change can be based. An interview and questionnaire instrument will be introduced. This will enable respondents to construct their own cognitive pathways of how changes which are pertinent to the local environment have evolve~. These pathways are then compared with the criteria Identified In land-use planning documentation, and the level of congruence between the two examined.

Experiences from many countries show that transport can have conflicting results on development. This is a question as to whether the provision of roads can stimulate the centres to generate ripple and trickle down effects or whether they drain raw material, capital, labour and entrepreneurial talent from surrounding areas. There is also a hypothesis that if there is a relationship between capital formation and economic growth, there must be a relationship between transport and the growth. This study explore this phenonmenon in depth in the context of a case study of North Sumatera in Indonesia. Economic growth factors and traffic volume data were collated from different sources covering the whole province of North Sumatera and were subjected to standard statistical tests. Despite the deficiencies in the data base, the findings suggest that the positive impact of roads on private investments, government activities and interregional trade is significant although roads may stimulate the concentration of investment and at the same time encourage interregional trade in the ports surrounding the primate city. It is also found that roads do not have a significant influence on the expansion of land use. The findings also show that in this case, the provision of roads has an impact on regional income but the speculation that the long term impact of roads leads to a backwash effect from the less developed subregions appears to be true. Regional inequalities may be reduced in some measure when all settlements in the region can be accessed by vehicles in all weathers. A simple model is . constructed to examine the relationship between the volume of ~raffic and economic growth factors. This model is based on the gravity model. The /findings show that agricultural land use and population have significant contribution to the generation of the volume of trucks and buses, respectively. Capital investment influences significantly on the generation of the volume of cars and trucks. Despite the level of significance, population makes the the smallest contributor to the volume of traffic. Due to data problems, the conclusions from this study must be drawn carefully. The findings of this study therefore are more indicative than conclusive. Even though they may indicate and permit an anticipation of the future role of transport, they should be interpreted more as trends and tendencies than an absolute predictions.