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Remote sensing techniques have proven utility to a wide range of planning problems. This research explores the adoption and application of remote sensing techniques by Virginia planning agencies. All planning agencies within the Commonwealth were sent a Remote Sensing Utilization Questionnaire. Survey results indicate that adoption of remote sensing products is low at all 1evels of planning; that most agency characteristics, e.g. staff size, budget, are not correlated with utilization; and, the lack of remote sensor adoption and use appears to be a result of the lack of remote sensor education among Virginia planners. Research results suggest also that the demand for information concerning remote sensor applications to planning problems is high among Virginia planners at all levels of planning. A high proportion of respondents at all planning levels stated that they would like additional remote sensing/planning applications information; would like more remote sensing/planning applications articles in professional planning journals; and, would send a representative to a remote sensing/planning applications conference if the conference were held within the state. Research results define major programmatic roles for federal and state agencies involved with remote sensor technologies and Virginia colleges and universities with remote sensing capabilities. / D.E.D.P.

Environmental Management has become a multijurisdictional responsibility, involving federal, state, and local agencies. Agencies formulate and direct programs towards the fulfillment of an assortment of objectives, based on their independent missions. These programs frequently are not integrated or coordinated across jurisdictional divisions. Policies, programs and projects developed by one agency or jurisdiction may, therefore, impact those of another. Interjurisdictional conflict may be triggered if these impacts are incompatible. These conflicts may interrupt and impede the implementation of program decisions and may delay the effective management of environmental resources. Judicial action, legislative intervention, arbitration, and mediation are approaches which are increasingly being used for conflict resolution. All these approaches attempt to resolve conflict, after decisions are made. A regional approach to multijurisdictional problems is another alternative to overcome interagency/interjurisdictional conflict through structural reorganization. The regional approach often is effective only at the pre-action staqa, however, and frequently is considered a threat to home rule and local autonomy if extended to management. All these arrangements tend to be very time consuming and cumbersome. Cooperative management offers an alternative approach for more effective multijurisdictional management of the environment.. The objective of cooperative management is to facilitate the implementation of management programs, through a sequential process of compatible decision-making. The conventional process of decision making is adapted to incorporate mechanisms of interagency cooperation and collaboration, communication, and negotiation in the formulation and selection of decision choices. The cooperative management process attempts to secure decision compatibility at the strategic, managerial and operational levels. Compatible decisions set the stage for more effective implementation.. While this study focuses on cooperative management among public agencies, the process described herein could have application as a mechanism to resolve/circumvent conflict among public interest groups, as well as between citizen groups and public agencies. This study incorporates the design and evaluation of the cooperative management process. A likely application in the context of land and resource management problems in Alaska also is attempted. Cooperative management may provide a workable and effective alternative for a wide range of multijurisdictional management problems. Whereas the process may not always culminate in compatible decisions 6 it might reduce the dependence of multijurisdictional management on external intervention for interagency conflict resolution. It may facilitate the accomplishment of a range of diverse objectives in a setting of greater harmony and cooperation. The model study draws that may be of cooperative management described in this upon and combines various component concepts found in the literature of public administration, planning. policy analysis, conflict management, and so forth. The contribution of this study is not the “invention” of new concepts but the innovation of a unique combination of available concepts to facilitate the formulation of decisions which are compatible, i.e. not unacceptable to public agencies at various levels of government. The notion of compatible decisions is a key component in cooperative management. Cooperative management does not seek (depend upon) full consensus but rather, the absence of unacceptance as the viability of a chosen course of action. / D.E.D.P.

The objectives of this research were to present an original formulation of a significant facilities location problem, the traveling salesman location problem, and to develop several heuristic solution procedures for determining minimum distance locations. Despite the wide applicability of the traveling salesman location problem, a survey of the facilities location literature revealed that this research effort apparently was the first to address the problem. After mathematically formulating the problem, several rather simple example problems were investigated in order to gain some insight regarding the behavior of the function under a variety of different conditions. Many of the results stemming from the study of the simple examples were counter-intuitive. Additionally, it was demonstrated that even for problems involving only a few existing facilities the resulting objective function is non-convex. Due to the non-convexity of the objective function and the overwhelming combinatorics involved with just one functional evaluation, it was desired that the solution procedures developed be capable of obtaining near optimal solutions in the shortest time possible. One of the solution techniques proposed, Procedure 2, was based on the Successive Quadratic Approximation Procedure. This procedure was selected for two reasons: 1) It was expected that the procedure would yield minimum solutions to large problems rather quickly, and 2) It was hoped that by approximating the function over the entire solution space, the procedure would tend to overlook local minimum points, and instead, find a global minimum point. It was demonstrated that while Procedure 2 is capable of obtaining optimal solutions, it does not immediately recognize a particular solution as being optimal. The other procedure proposed, Procedure 1, based on a relationship between the Steiner-Weber problem and the traveling salesman location problem, was selected because of its ability to immediately recognize a particular solution as being a local minimum point. At each iteration Procedure 1 required the solution of a Steiner-Weber problem as well as solutions to the "string" of traveling salesman problems. The Steiner-Weber problems were solved through the use of the Hyperbolic Approximation Procedure. It was verified that both procedures are capable of obtaining optimal solutions by applying each procedure to several of the example problems. The effectiveness of each procedure in finding minimum distance solutions was determined by applying each procedure to a number of randomly generated problems, and then comparing the resulting execution times and minimum distance solutions. A difference of two percent or more between the minimum distance solutions obtained for a given problem was considered to be significant. Problems involving 4, 6, 8, 10, and 11 existing facilities were solved. No attempts were made to solve larger problems due to the excessively long execution times required. On the basis of the computational results obtained, it was concluded that 1) There is no significant difference between Procedures 1 and 2 for problems involving four existing facilities. 2) For about 15 to 20 percent of the problems involving 6, 8, 10, or 11 existing facilities, Procedure 1 performs better than Procedure 2. By examining the mean execution times for each procedure, it was found that there was little significant difference between the two procedures until rather large problems were solved. Procedure 2 required relatively shorter execution times than Procedure 1 for problems involving 10 or 11 existing facilities. However, the reduction in execution time for Procedure 2 occurred at a point where it was considered economically infeasible to continue to examine larger problems. The length of execution times for larger problems can probably be reduced by: 1) Eliminating the need to evaluate all traveling salesman problems by setting many of the PhiS, the subset probabilities, equal to zero, and 2) Replacing the branch and bound algorithm for solving traveling salesman problems with one of the more effective heuristic procedures that have been developed. / Master of Science

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the metropolitan regional planning programs of four case study areas in which one form or another of metropolitan governmental reorganization had occurred. The case studies selected are representative of four different types of areawide reorganization. Five federally funded planning programs, representing both physical and social planning, were selected as the basis upon which the case study planning programs would be evaluated. Within each of the four metropolitan regions the responsibility for each of the five planning programs was evaluated, along with the interrelationships between the various planning agencies. The compatibility of the case study organizations with the federal planning program criteria is the major determinant of the viability of the case study organizations as viable metropolitan regional planning bodies. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

The growing global affliction of ‘inhumanism’ is shaking our surroundings. Landscapes of resource extraction, agroindustrial production, energy and information circulation, waste management and geopolitical strategies, also known as Operational Landscapes, has made it an urgent necessity to reclaim human agency and accountability to resist environmental and social collapse driven by contemporary capitalist geopolitics and biotechnologies of control. This report utilizes a rural place far north - Gállok, situated in Jokkmokk Municipality, Norrbotten County, as a case study to explore alternative methods of being present on and representing place. Site-writing, as a methodology is used to test as well as to inform the structure of this thesis and its research. Through the site-writings of Gállok a set of acts (I-V ) serves as parallel narratives to the scientific research, emphasizing the importance of each chapter of the report. Gállok was chosen as case to highlight the challenging relationship between a place and its embodiments, to the broader environmental and socio-political context as it potentially faces a completely new and challenging function, as a mining site. The research aims to explore and reveal the impacts that human-orchestrated use of space has on nature, why these impacts occur and how they can be rethought through transdisciplinary approaches. Through the design project, the layers that are part of a place are the layers that are part of Gállok, as a place, are further explored, as how disturbances affect the layers among themselves, to finally speculate on how an increased understanding of the embedded layers and their conditions can influence architecture and urban and regional planning processes. The design project, called The Air We Breathe, focuses on air and its quality as one of the most important common denominators for all life on Earth, yet a system that we, through anthropocentrism, are destroying to our own detriment.  The idea of this essay and the design project is not to provide any solutions, but rather to start a discussion in the matter. The vision is to acknowledge as much as possible given the limited time for the thesis. With a personal goal to explore alternative ways of communicating and representing the findings, this thesis is my way to practice research by design and design by research, using architecture as my main tool.