URISA Journal Special Issue

Call for papers

Urban and Regional Modeling versus
Planning Practice: Bridging the Gap

Rapid evolution reinforced the use of GIS in spatial planning, both by the professional planners and by the general public on the way to the participation planning and democratic decision making. GIS is now commonly accepted as a default planning platform. Urban and regional plans are based on numerous layers of GIS information on population and infrastructure, and are expressed with the series of layers of constraints, preferences and scenarios. In parallel, GIS-based information on the land-uses, residential patterns or transportation is a basis for spatially explicit dynamic models of urban and regional development. The plans aim at implementing planner's view of "desirable future"; the dynamic models aim to capture the major factors that govern urban and regional development and investigating system's "possible futures".

The goal of the special issue is to bring together the experts in the fields of planning and urban and regional modeling to address "desirable" and "possible" urban and regional futures and to present the state-of-the-art in rapidly developing domain of planning-oriented spatially explicit urban and regional modeling.

We solicit original research papers on, but not limited to:

Practically oriented geosimulation models of urban and regional development
GIS-based evaluation of the past urban and regional plans versus reality
The use of the models of land-use/land-cover change in planning practice
High-resolution (or fine-scale) modeling of urban transport and transportation
Advances in spatial decision support systems and their uses for urban and regional planning
Planning-support environments and the experience of their use for the real-world problems
Scenario-based planning and forecasting

Submission:
The abstracts should be submitted via EasyChair, register yourself as Author. Email your questions to urisaj2011@easychair.org

Important dates:

Letter of intention and one-page abstracts:   February 15, 2011
Notification of accepting of abstracts:          March 01, 2011
Full papers:                                               June 01, 2011

Guest Editors:
Itzhak Benenson, Tel Aviv University, www.tau.ac.il/~bennya/
Bin Jiang, University of Gävle, http://fromto.hig.se/~bjg/