Malcolm Burns

The Liberalization of the Land Market in Spain: The 1998 Reform of Urban Planning Legislation

Against a general climate of liberalization, the Spanish Government has made a concerted effort to bring about a reduction in house prices. A legislative reform in April 1998 has sought to liberalize land and planning, through (a) refining the category of land previously excluded from development to enable residential development to take place, (b) allowing for greater flexibility of land uses and building controls, and (c) reducing administrative controls. This paper discusses the extent to which such reforms are likely to meet their anticipated objectives, resulting in beneficial effects in the land and housing markets, as well as the territorial impact of such reforms from a sustainability perspective.

Indicators for Spatial Planning and Territorial Cohesion: Stakeholder-Driven Selection Approach for Improving Usability at Regional and Local Levels

González A., Daly G., Pinch P., Adams N., Valtenbergs V., Burns M. C. and Johannesson H. Indicators for spatial planning and territorial cohesion: stakeholder-driven selection approach for improving usability at regional and local levels, Regional Studies. Reformed European Union Cohesion Policy aims at delivering a coherent investment policy to achieve the Europe 2020 Strategy goals and to reduce regional disparities. Spatial indicators measure progress towards agreed policy goals and support place-based approaches to policy implementation. Despite the range of indicators available, development of a standardized approach in support of Cohesion Policy has received little empirical attention. A set of key spatial indicators has been identified in a stakeholder-driven process. The methodological approach applied is presented and resulting indicators critically appraised with regards to their applicability and potential for assisting improved integration between Cohesion Policy and spatial planning.

Texture Analysis for Correcting and Detecting Classification Structures in Urban Land Uses; "Metropolitan area case study - Spain"

Texture analysis can be a good indicator of the presence of buildings and other objects and they are usually easier to detect than the often-complex multi-textured objects which cause them. Spot 5 images present complex scene of urban area. However, behind this complexity, within a focused area, buildings and industries tend to be aligned following some specific direction [Sohn, G., et al., 2001]. Elements of built-form, which together with land surface, physical infrastructure and communication networks comprise artificialised areas, tend to align in some dominant direction in a small area and possess geometric regularity. Therefore, their boundaries also align following these dominant directions in a small area in spite of the acquisition condition. Classification errors are caused by similar reflection (wave length) from different elements inside the satellite image, such as urban areas and irrigated land, affecting the separation between the built-form and non-built-form areas to define them in the classification process. What dose this mean? The amount of pixels in each category will play an important role in defining or increasing the accuracy of the final classification [David, C.H., et al., 2002]. The resulting land activity classification of Spot 5 scenes covering the metropolitan areas (MA) of Madrid and Barcelona form the basis of this study. The result shows that the classification process confused similar parts of land cover. Moreover, unlike other classes in urban areas, the boundary can be successfully segmented by a conventional pixel-base classification method. The promising results from this analysis prove that an amount of pixels in each category boundary could be used as a potential cue for automated detection and for the correction of classification errors which had arisen in the process. This paper focuses on the development of a methodology based on the texture analysis of urban areas that may improve the urban investigation through remote sensing. This study can be divided into two fundamental steps: the first, to work over the initial classification results that showed an error between different elements such as urban areas and irrigated field areas that have a similar classification result. The idea is to apply texture analysis to separate the different elements by using a number of pixels in each category boundary. The second, recovering isolated missing urban fabric data. In fact, it is hard to face this problem through the high resolution images for clearer illustration of all urban fabric areas but it is hard to get small elements that occupied small pixels areas to appear in the different classification process, in case these elements surroundings the different pixels that occupied with completely different elements. Texture analysis will play an important role in detecting this isolated data and reducing the error and improving the classification results [Vu, T.T., et al., 2004].

Evaluating the Impacts of Urban Regeneration Companies in Portugal: The Case of Porto

Cities have undergone many changes since the 1950s, not least the expansion of urban areas to the detriment of the historic central areas, some of which have been left to decay. In Portugal the most visible results of this phenomenon are found in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto. To address this problem, the Portuguese Government conceived the first legal instrument for urban regeneration in 2004 which allows the local administrations to form publicly owned companies—urban regeneration companies (SRUs) to actively endorse urban regeneration in historic city centres. This paper discusses the activities of the Porto Vivo SRU, one of these companies created in Porto, in the context of the Portuguese milieu of urban regeneration and evaluates Porto Vivos operation.

La medición y previsión del consumo de suelo en las Costas Ibéricas

El consumo de suelo derivado de la urbanizacion es un tema recurrente que se encuentra dentro de diversos informes sobre politicas urbanas, tanto a nivel europeo como a nivel estatal. Cada vez mas, estos documentos se refieren a la importancia del suelo como un recurso finito y la necesidad de proteger el suelo del desarrollo urbano incontrolado y de los patrones de desarrollo expansivo y disperso. En este articulo se analiza una serie de cuestiones metodologicas que surgen de una linea de investigacion en relacion con la medicion del consumo de suelo y la prediccion de escenarios futuros de desarrollo urbano en un contexto del Sur de Europa, apoyandose en las tecnicas de teledeteccion y los automatas celulares. Se espera que el resultado de esta investigacion sea util, no solo para proporcionar evidencia empirica y aumentar la conciencia publica de los riesgos ambientales que se derivan de un crecimiento urbano expansivo, sino tambien para ayudar a los tecnicos y los politicos por igual en el proceso de la toma de decisiones publicas sobre el futuro crecimiento urbano.

CONTRASTING STRUCTURES OF METROPOLITAN MOBILITY IN SPAIN

The results used in this paper are drawn from an INTERREG ITC European Union project examining the territorial and functional characteristics of the Spanish metropolitan urban regions, and its integration within the south west European urban systems. Seven Spanish metropolitan areas (Barcelona, Madrid, Malaga, Seville, Valencia, Bilbao and Zaragoza) are considered in order to explain the nature of urban mobility of each case. Economic agglomerations, morphologic agglomerations and spaces responding to the delimitations of functional urban regions were identified as three kinds of clearly differentiated territorial spaces. The study adopted the methodology used by the United States Census Bureau for the identification of the Spanish metropolitan areas, based on travel to work trips. The analysis of the flows of journeys between the places of residence and work allowed the achievement of a clear understanding of the nature of mobility patterns in the respective metropolitan regions.