Nikhil Kaza

Robust Plans and Contingent Plans

Problem: The practice of scenario planning is often too focused on developing a single preferred scenario and fails to adequately consider multiple uncertain futures. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently awarded grants for scenario planning at regional and metropolitan scales that further promote this practice. However, a lack of systematic analysis of uncertainty limits the role of scenario planning. Purpose: The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to incorporate uncertainty into large-scale scenario analysis and then use that framework to identify contingent and robust plans. Methods: We adapt the concepts of controllable internal options and uncontrollable external forces and consider their interactions in order to develop future scenarios and identify contingent and robust decisions. We then apply this technique using advanced econometric, land use, and transportation models developed for the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan region and its vicinity. Finally, based on the results of a hypothetical, yet plausible, exercise, we show how contingent and robust decisions can help local and regional governments develop contingent and robust plans. Results and conclusions: Scenarios developed as a combination of internal options and external forces allow us to identify a wider range of future impacts than in traditional metropolitan scenario planning. Robust plans support choices that offer benefits across scenarios. Contingent plans can be tailored to specific futures. Takeaway for practice: By providing a way to think systematically about uncertainty, scenario analysis promises to improve the efficacy of large-scale planning. Research support: This article was not directly supported by any outside agency, but support for the modeling system was provided by the following organizations: Maryland State Highway Administration, Maryland Department of Transportation, Maryland Department of Planning, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Tyranny of the Median and Costly Consent: A Reflection on the Justification for Participatory Urban Planning Processes

Wide participation, in the urban planning context, is justified as the means of balancing multiple interests outside the traditional decision-making setup. However, this article argues that the participatory paradigm provides at best inadequate justification to the planning process. Particularly if consensus building is the aim of the participatory process, it suffers from a number of impossibility results well documented in the political economics literature. ‘Lazy deliberators’ will arrive at the acceptance of a priori median preference, and participatory processes necessarily exclude some groups, even under equitable capability and power distribution. This article intends to contribute to the debate on the nature of participatory planning by critically analyzing the motivations of participation and limitation of the participatory planning paradigms, and advocates a temperate view on their efficacy.

The land value impacts of wetland restoration

U.S. regulations require offsets for aquatic ecosystems damaged during land development, often through restoration of alternative resources. What effect does large-scale wetland and stream restoration have on surrounding land values? Restoration effects on real estate values have substantial implications for protecting resources, increasing tax base, and improving environmental policies. Our analysis focuses on the three-county Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, North Carolina region, which has experienced rapid development and extensive aquatic ecological restoration (through the states Ecosystem Enhancement Program [EEP]). Since restoration sites are not randomly distributed across space, we used a genetic algorithm to match parcels near restoration sites with comparable control parcels. Similar to propensity score analysis, this technique facilitates statistical comparison and isolates the effects of restoration sites on surrounding real estate values. Compared to parcels not proximate to any aquatic resources, we find that, 1) natural aquatic systems steadily and significantly increase parcel values up to 0.75 mi away, and 2) parcels <0.5 mi from EEP restoration sites have significantly lower sale prices, while 3) parcels >0.5 mi from EEP sites gain substantial amenity value. When we control for intervening water bodies (e.g. un-restored streams and wetlands), we find a similar inflection point whereby parcels <0.5 mi from EEP sites exhibit lower values, and sites 0.5-0.75 mi away exhibit increased values. Our work points to the need for higher public visibility of aquatic ecosystem restoration programs and increased public information about their value.

The Land Use Energy Connection

To date, most planners have focused on the relationship between urban form and energy consumption. They argue that compact housing and urban patterns reduce both household and transportation energy use and should be promoted to combat a variety of ills, including import dependency and climate change. However, planners also have a strong role to play in energy production, particularly with the increasing adoption of renewable forms of energy. Planners will play an integral part in harmonizing local land use regulations and policies that will either promote or hinder the adoption of these technologies. In this article, we review industry and government reports, regulations, professional standards, news articles, and peer-reviewed literature in disparate fields. We identify pertinent environmental and land use planning issues of different types of centralized, distributed, conventional, and renewable energy generation, the implications and externalities of their fuel extraction, transportation, transmission and distribution, siting of generation facilities as well as the disposal of the waste. While the literature is voluminous, these issues have received scant attention in the planning literature. We make the case that land use and environmental planners should have a strong interest in energy.

Making room for manufacturing: Understanding industrial land conversion in cities

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Planners face tension when dealing with the stock of urban industrial land: Should they enact industrial land preservation policies to protect viable manufacturers that provide good jobs even if it exacerbates the problem of affordable housing and causes cities to forgo growth in other sectors? Planners need better information on the underlying forces that lead to conversion of industrial land and an assessment of the effectiveness of preservation policies. We develop here an index of vulnerability of industrial land that is based on location factors, neighborhood dynamics, detailed industrial trends, environmental hazards, and local regulations. We show how these factors can explain the probability of the conversion of industrial land to other uses in Cook County (IL) and Mecklenburg County (NC) and describe how various industrial preservation polices are effective in limiting conversion. Takeaway for practice: Cities can use this index to strategically plan for industries to target and sites to preserve as industrial uses. Traditional planning and regulatory tools such as industrial zone designations do reduce conversion risk, while factors such as transit accessibility increase the probability of conversion. We argue that local governments should be strategic about which manufacturing industries can be preserved at what locations using these tools. We also develop and demonstrate an open source, interactive, web-based tool that demonstrates some of the key concepts that can be replicated in other places.

Radical uncertainty: scenario planning for futures:

The use of scenario planning in urban and regional planning practice has grown in the last decade as one way to face uncertainty. However, in adapting scenario planning from its origins in the business sector, planners have eliminated two key components: (1) the use of multiple scenarios, and (2) the inclusion of diverse organizations, people, and interests through deep deliberations. We argue that this shift limits the ability of planners to plan for multiple plausible futures that are shaped by an increasing number of diverse actors. In this paper, we use case-study research to examine how uncertainty was considered in four scenario-planning processes. We analyzed and compared the cases based on analytical categories related to multiple futures and diversity. We found that the processes that used multiple, structurally distinct scenarios explored a wider range of topics and issues shaping places. All four relied heavily on professional stakeholders as the scenario developers, limiting public input. Only one of the processes that included multiple futures captured the differential effects that scenarios would have on diverse people and interests. Overall, the purpose of the scenario planning drove the participant diversity and ultimately the quality and use of the scenarios.

The Spatio-temporal Clustering of Green Buildings in the United States

This paper explores the spatial and temporal patterns of green building in the commercial and institutional sectors in the US. While these buildings are becoming more commonplace, they have yet to reach a critical mass to affect the entire construction industry. Given the potential for green building practices to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, the paper seeks to understand the geography of green building. Using multiple metrics, it explains the patterning of geography of LEED and Energy Star certified buildings in the US. Strong evidence is found of clustering at the metropolitan and sub-metropolitan scales. This exploratory research serves as a foundation for future research aimed at specifying the nature of agglomerative processes in green buildings.

Peak Oil, Urban Form, and Public Health: Exploring the Connections

We assessed the relationships between peak oil and urban form, travel behavior, and public health. Peak oil will affect the general economy, travel behavior, and urban form through income and substitution effects; however, because of the wide range of substitution possibilities, the impacts are likely to be gradual and relatively small. Furthermore, we suggest that changes in travel behavior and increases in urban density will have both favorable and unfavorable effects on public health. To mitigate the adverse impacts and to maximize the positive effects of peak oil, we recommend that careful attention should be paid to urban design and public health responses for a range of urbanization patterns.

Location Efficiency and Mortgage Risks for Low-Income Households

Abstract Household energy expenditures, especially for transportation, are fairly inelastic. Their effects on low-income households may be significant, due to the potential for energy consumption to displace other types of consumption when energy prices rise. Using accessibility as a proxy for lower transportation costs, we test the hypothesis that low- and moderate-income residents are less likely default when they are located in more accessible places. We find that regional accessibility has almost no effect on risks of default, but local job diversity has moderate mitigating effect.

Persons, polities and planning

Deliberative democracy often presumes that the deliberators are members of a political community who often share common understanding about their values, even when they disagree about them. Participatory planning processes building upon these ideas argue that planning itself has to be communicative among a variety of interest groups and should, usually, result in a common consensus. However, the boundaries of these groups rarely get attention. These boundaries shape not only the discursive practices within groups but also among them, and therefore need to be examined more thoroughly. Furthermore, the relationship of membership to substantive issues of planning is important yet underexplored. Political membership in a diverse, mobile, transient and multicultural world is a contested subject and should be given deserving attention for its implications for planning practice.