Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 146-154). / This thesis explores the possibility of reducing transportation emissions by reducing the growth of demand for travel in the United States light-duty vehicle fleet. Many government agencies seek to reduce the environmental and social ills associated with excess travel demand (e.g. congestion, reduced safety during travel, local pollution and noise, energy consumption, and climate change). These agencies have many tools at their disposal to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita - including encouraging compact mixed-use development, providing alternatives to single occupancy vehicle travel such as transit and biking and walking infrastructure, and restricting/regulating driving alone for instance by providing less parking. But the fastest way to reduce travel demand is through higher pricing that accounts for the externalities that drivers impose upon each other and society more broadly. The degree to which higher pricing can reduce travel demand is a function of two interrelated factors: 1) how high of a price increase is politically feasible to implement, and 2) the degree to which the driving public responds to the higher cost of driving. Both these factors vary over time. Given that carbon pricing and/or higher gas taxes are likely to take years to gain broader political acceptability, the future price elasticities of travel demand are just as relevant as today's elasticities. Therefore, this thesis focuses on the variability of price elasticity, the factors that explain this variation, and how these factors might change in the future. Using a diverse set of methods including literature review, semi-structured interviews, and odometer data, I find evidence that the magnitude of price elasticity is lower for vehicles of higher fuel economy, for vehicles further from the urban center, and for vehicles in lower income zipcodes. This is the first analysis I am aware of that evaluates the variation of the price elasticity of travel demand within a metro area, an approach that is important to the understanding the political feasibility of pricing and as a lens to the future effectiveness of pricing. It suggests that gas price increases will affect certain households in very different ways, with the most inelastic households simply paying more to maintain their lifestyle and the most elastic households pushed to make significant changes to their daily travel patterns and opportunities. These two types of impact may lead to different types of resistance to the policy. As for the future, the findings regarding fuel economy and distance to the urban center are particularly relevant, as we foresee society continues to become more metropolitan and the vehicle fleet is increasingly comprised of high fuel economy vehicles. Finally, the magnitude of price response suggested by both my interviews and my odometer data analysis suggests that price is still a significant determining factor in distance driven; therefore, policy that increases the cost of driving remains an important emissions reduction strategy. / by Philip W. Kreycik. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 248-253). / by Christina C. Chiu. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [79]-80). / by Carissa Gizelle Climaco. / M.C.P.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-63). / In the past, international real estate investment has consisted of direct equity investment in foreign countries. Such investments have traditionally been considered to provide diversification benefits given that it was assumed that such properties were affected predominately by their respective domestic economies. Of course another benefit of international investment is the ability to seek out the best risk adjusted returns, wherever they may be. Due to the recent globalization and securitization trends, today investors are finding that they have another investment option, international real estate public markets. This thesis addresses several of the issues related to the emergence of these markets in four countries: Germany, Australia, France, and Japan. For each of these countries extensive data was obtained for both the private and public markets in order to statistically examine various related relationships. Specifically, this thesis attempts to find answers to the three following questions: 1. Are GDP, rents, private, and public prices following a random walk or a trend-reverting pattern? 2. How does the local economy affect the real estate markets? 3. How do the public and private real estate markets relate with each other? It is important to note that the purpose of this thesis was to systematically examine the data, and then to present the results. An in-depth analysis of the results was not the intent. For Question one it was found that the majority of the public prices were random whereas the results for rents and private prices were predominately persistent. Also, an absence of any significant trends was found for the real estate data. These results would tend to indicate that for all of the countries studied the public market was much more volatile, and presumably efficient, than the private market. Question two related directly to the issue of diversification. A significant contemporaneous relationship was found to exist between GDP and the private market. And an even stronger contemporaneous linkage between GDP and public prices was also found. It was thus concluded that shifting from direct investment to public market investment would not likely increase diversification benefits. The results for Question three indicated a strong contemporaneous relationship between rents and private prices. The lagged relationships for the rents-public was found to be stronger than the contemporaneous in all the cases. The results for the private-public relationship were not consistent. For all the countries, except Germany public prices were found to lead private prices. / by C. Randall Speck. / S.M.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1972. M.C.P. / Bibliography: leaves 244-248. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1990. / Title as it appears in the Sept. 1990 M.I.T. Graduate List: Enterprising community development corporations--non-profit housing innovation in metropolitan Washington, D.C. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 141-150). / by Hershel S. Lipow. / M.S.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 108-111). / Land use classification is important as a standard for land use description and management. However, current land use classification systems are problematic. Labels such as "residential use" and "commercial use" do not fully reveal how the land use is used in terms of function, mix use and changes over time. As a result, land use planning is often a natural prompt of segregation; Land use is poorly connected with other fields of urban studies such as transportation and energy consumption. The problems of land use are partly because land use classification has been an expediency rather than of rigorous thought. However, recent researches about land use classification have mainly focused on the methods of estimating land use types, without challenging the conventional instructional definition of land use typology itself. In contrast, this thesis aims to ask a more fundamental question: what are the elements, the principles, and the process to build the land use typology for given purposes. This thesis accordingly proposes the syntax of developing a land use typology, where five basic elements compose the framework of land use description: land use function, land use intensity, land use connectivity, probability and scale. While the elements are abstract concepts, when developing a land use typology, each of them could be defined with specific measures for purposes such as land use planning, land use management, energy analysis, transportation study. After the land use typology is composed with the defined elements, it can be applied to examine land mixed use, land use conflict, land use change and estimation. The syntax then proposes the basic principles and process to develop a satisfied land use typology, with respect to the reliability and validity, the significance and necessity, the measurability and operability, and the adaptability and flexibility. With that, this thesis argues that beyond the theoretical definition, the practical context, such as data availability or planning schema will influence the feasibility of a land use typology. While the scope of the syntax could be limited by practical tools and availability of data, the coming age of big data provides a changing context of land use typology. The followed case study illustrates such a process of developing land use typology with geo-social network data. The case develops a social media based land use typology, collects data for two example cities: Boston, U.S and Shenzhen, China, and applies the defined land use typology to classify their uses of land. As a result, Boston's land use I classified by its function, intensity and the level of mix use; Shenzhen land use is classified by its intensity, connectivity and the level of mix use. Compared with the conventional land use classification systems, the social media based typology provides a more comprehensive description of land use, with its focuses on human activities of the city and multiple dimensions of urban land use. It also has advantages with the flexibility and efficiency of data collection. In conclusion, the syntax of land use typology highlights the process of building land use typology, by defining the basic components of land use typology. It enables many possibilities of land use description with the help of big data, and reserves enough space to go beyond the existing tools and techniques. At last, the thesis proposes for future studies on the different interpretations of the syntax, its application on planning tools and systems, and potential for new types of land use. / by Liqun Chen. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 95-96). / Targeting project areas and defining the objectives are the most important procedures to plan neighborhood economic development, such as the Boston Main Street Program. Which shopping district is to be encouraged and how? However, this has not been an easy task, especially when the neighborhood is in the inner city, because the inner city is so diversified that planners can not find clear spatial patterns on which to base their decisions. This paper attempts to extract patterns of socioeconomic phenomena relevant to economic development and map them. The advancing technology of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has made it easier to apply raster (grid cell or bit pattern) analysis to studying urban spatial patterns. A map that shows socioeconomic phenomena via rasterization and smoothing processing is called "socioeconomic topography" here. Just as conventional topography shows us geographical features, socioeconomic topography illustrates the spatial pattern and clustering of socioeconomic features of a given area. The following maps are created as socioeconomic topography to support planning of inner city economic development: (1) land use allocation, (2) land value, (3) business variation, (4) shopping convenience, and (5) leading industrial clusters. On each map, spatial patterns stand out clearly from the chaos of Boston's inner city. Socioeconomic topography offers a new way of understanding the inner city and illuminates the need of made-to-order projects for each shopping district. / by Hideo Sakamoto. / M.C.P.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 280-298). / by Ramón Borges-Méndez. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-81). / by Buckley Ken Yung. / M.C.P.