Meir Gross

Greenway planning: developing a landscape ecological network approach

Greenway planning has steadily grown in popularity in the planning and design professions as an efficient and socially desirable approach to open space planning. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical and methodological approach to greenway planning that accounts for regional biodiversity and systematizes the selection of greenway links. The approach used in this paper is based on the premise that a network of wildlife reserves and corridors should serve as the skeletal framework of a comprehensive greenway system. The paper draws from the knowledge bases of landscape ecology, conservation biology, network theory, and landscape planning. A case study is presented to demonstrate the approach using a forested region of Central New England.

Back to the future, back to basics: the social ecology of landscapes and the future of landscape planning

This paper discusses what we believe are the key needs and assets of landscape planning at the close of the century. While landscape ecology and systems approaches have increased our understanding of ecological sustainability, this still fails to constitute a sufficient basis for prescribing overall regional sustainability. If we are to foster strategies that will effectively lead to sustainable regional development, we must, like our predecessors, investigate and advocate for a more critical social ecology of landscapes. While most of us venerate the works of Mumford, McHarg, and Olmstead, we generally forget two facts. First, their real value was in their ability to formulate and articulate socially and ecologically relevant arguments to the problems associated with an aberrant development paradigm. Second, they spoke not of strategy and technique, but of challenging and altering the dominant social theories and practices that have caused the degradation of our landscapes in the first place. Landscape planning is clearly ecologically relevant. Our challenge therefore lies in our social relevance. To become more socially relevant, landscape planners must become aware of, account for, incorporate, and challenge the problems and opportunities that cultural adoptability, economic viability, social equitability, and political relevancy have on the condition of our landscapes. For although natural processes largely determine the ecological condition of our landscapes, social processes will continue to determine the directionality these processes take. Since the fate of our landscapes lies in the hands of humankind, it is imperative that research move beyond traditional descriptions of space, academic divisions, and rational methods. We must also reassert vision, value, and ethic, account for the relationships among the physical, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of space, and finally, better incorporate the knowledges, perceptions, and practices that exist between the places we study and the peoples and communities who call them home.

Using the Delphi process to analyze social policy implementation: A post hoc case from vocational rehabilitation

This study uses a Policy Delphi to discern differences in perspective among and within groups responsible for formulating and implementing vocational rehabilitation policy. Four groups of players were chosen for our analysis: government officials, academics, directors of rehabilitation centers, and the staff who interface with program participants. Significant differences were found between the groups regarding the relative importance of possible legislative goals. This suggests that the failure of vocational rehabilitation policy to promote a work agenda may be attributed to a lack of consensus among policy implementors. The Delphi technique could help policy planners understand the different perspectives within the implementation community, and hence craft more realistic legislation.

Legal Gambling as a Strategy for Economic Development

Lotteries, casinos, and other forms of gambling are being promoted by state and local governments as painless ways to raise revenues. Supporters often rely on economic studies sponsored by the industry. Critics contend that gambling is problematic and not a substitute for sustainable economic development, and the public remains ambivalent. Bills currently pending in Congress would establish a national commission to study the impact of gambling. Long-term health of communities requires the promotion of well-researched and well-reasoned policies on legal gambling and economic development.

Breeding birds and vegetation: A quantitative assessment

Abstract A 5-year study of urban/suburban breeding birds in Amherst, Massachusetts, U.S.A., focused on the relationship between breeding birds and vegetation composition and structure. Over all habitats, and throughout the 5-year period, woody vegetation volume alone accounted for 50% of all the variation in breeding bird species number, and species richness kept increasing even at relatively high vegetation volumes. Sixty-five species of breeding birds were seen during the study, and these can be divided into three groups based on their overall abundance in the sample areas and on their amenability to management: one group is liable to occur anyway, whether or not woody vegetation volume is encouraged as a management strategy; the second group is liable to be well represented where vegetation volume is encouraged but not well represented where it is not, and is the group most suitably targeted for management; the last group consists of birds which are poorly adapted to built-up areas, and which — though detected in small numbers — are not judged likely to increase significantly even where vegetation volume is augmented.

A fuzzy-group multicriteria decisionmaking model and its application to land-use planning

Making decisions in planning has three prominent characteristics: multicriteria, multiparticipants, and fuzziness. A model that deals with these three properties simultaneously is presented as a promising tool for land-use planning, and its potential usefulness in group decisionmaking and for building expert systems is discussed.

Wildlife and greenspace planning in medium-scale residential developments

Abstract The spatial arrangement of woody vegetation in residential developments from 40 to 1000 ha is analyzed in terms of the “species-area curve” and other principles of island biogeography. These principles, which predict the number of wildlife species which will occur in an area as a function of the size, shape and distribution of vegetation patches in the area, promise to be a powerful tool in greenspace planning. Using birds as an example, we examine some of the trade-offs among wildlife, visual and recreational amenities which are associated with three different approaches to the arrangement of a given amount of greenspace. These three approaches are examined both at the scale of small and large subdivisions and at a micro-regional scale of 10 km2.

Explorations in bird-land geometry

Abstract The spatial distribution of woody vegetation in areas of residential development is analyzed in terms of the conflicting demands placed on such vegetation by people and wildlife. Human needs favor one-layer-deep plantings which provide the maximum visual surface area for the minimum ground space occupied; most forest bird species prefer clumps and larger “islands” of vegetation providing not only encircling visual cover but a more spatially compact resource base. On larger housing lots in North America, the tendency to extreme dispersion of woody vegetation can be traced historically to a preference for rectangular over triangular lot boundaries and for rectangular grid street patterns over street patterns oriented to circles or to polygons with more than four sides. Several examples are offered of triangular lot designs and of non-rectangular street patterns. These allow small patches of woody vegetation on private lots to be clumped effectively together into small and medium-sized woods which are capable of supporting significant subsets of the forest avifauna.

A method for assessing wetland characteristics and values

Abstract The method presented for assessing wetland values identifies the relative importance of wetlands in providing wildlife habitat, flood control and improvement to surface water quality. All wetlands in the study area were categorized on the basis of their landscape position of hilltop, hillside or valley. Each of the wetland values measured were then related to the corresponding landscape position categories. Valley wetlands were found to be most valuable in all instances. The method provides information on wetland values which can be simply gathered and easily assessed, requiring only available data and a minimum of resources. Implementation of this method on a regional or municipality-wide basis can provide local decision-makers with readily accessible and comparative information on wetland values.

Steiner minimal trees and urban service networks

The optimal configuration of urban service networks has recently been shown to be a computationally difficult problem. However, there are efficient and effective techniques by which this optimal configuration of urban service networks can be approximated. In this paper, we analyze the Lp Steiner Network problem in the plane R2 and demonstrate its applicability to the urban service network problem. We present a simple algorithm for estimating the Lp metric parameter for random points in the plane, then utilize it to find the Lp values for four different American cities. Finally, we apply the LpSMT algorithm described within the text to one of the cities in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm for determining optimal network configurations.