3.0 LOCATION THEORY: THE FOUNDATION OF PLANNING

3.0 LOCATION THEORY: THE FOUNDATION OF PLANNING
At the end of the lesson the students must be able to:
1. Understand the location theory as the foundation of planning.
2. Identify the location theory of Johann Heinrich von Thunen and William Alonso.


Dissatisfaction on the part of individuals and groups concerning their relationships with the environment will lead them to take modifying actions. These changes could include:
- the nature of the activity itself
- the space in which it was carried out
- its location with respect to all other activities
- the kinds of communications made with activities at other locations
- the channels which served to carry or transmit them

Modifying actions cause repercussions on other activities, spaces, communications, and channels. Ex. when a man decides to leave his car for work and uses the train, his action causes repercussions though how trivial and unnoticeable. But if several hundred are to do the same, then the effects would be noticeable

Actions taken by individuals and groups in interest can bring about conditions which give rise to serious social, economic, and aesthetic problems connected with the use of land.

Planning seeks to…
a) regulate or control the activity of individual and groups in such a way as to minimize the bad effects which may arise.
b) promote better performance of the physical environment in accordance with a set of broad aims and more specific objectives set out in a plan.

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Location theory…
� explains the pattern of land use
� indicates a solution to the problem of what is the most rational use of land suggesting ways in which the current pattern can be improved.


Johann Heinrich von Thunen (1826)…

� postulated that around a central town
-rural land of constant fertility assumed different forms
(the type of land use varies with distance away from the market)
- land use diminishing intensively in reverse relationship to increased distance from the town.
(The intensity of production declines with distance away from the market)
� land in greatest demand would be as near as possible to the market on account of low transport costs.
- the highest rent would be gained for this advantage and the highest value output per hectare would accrue.
� outer belt would have little demand for land because of transport costs.
- rent would be low and the value of extensive production would be correspondingly low.

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Modifications…
� overall use pattern might be modified by the existence of a navigable river.
…cost of river transport are low especially for bulky commodities compared to fairly high transport cost overland.
…river would have the effect of extending the different land uses almost parallel along its course.
� further modification might occur if a small city with its own production zones is located within the land use pattern of the main settlements.

Von Thunen model assumed unlikely conditions such as production taking place around an isolated market place and soil being of constant fertility. However, it established a distance-cost relationship which recently became the basis of urban location theory.
© as price mechanism largely decides the profitability or utility of goods and services, it subsequently determines the location of activity and the spatial structure of the urban area supplying these goods and services



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William Alonso…
� rents diminish outward from the center of a city to offset both lower revenue and higher operating costs and not least transport costs.
…a rent gradient would compensate for falling revenue and higher operating costs
…different land uses would have different rent gradients, the use with the highest gradient prevailing.

use “a” prevails up to a distance of 2kms from the CBD, from 2 to 5kms use “b” is dominant, and beyond 5kms use “c” prevails.
a change of use could be expected to take place through the price mechanism when one gradient falls below another.
Alonso model did not specify the type of land use associated with each bid-gradient.
assumed that the urban area has a single nucleus and that the market for land is perfect.

Locational determinants of commercial and industrial use…


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A. COST
� price and rent of land fall with increased distance from the CBD.
� wages are higher in the center
…local demand for labor being greater than local supply.
…commuting costs need to be offset by higher remuneration. (transport cost more of a reflection of accessibility than distance)
� locations close to junctions, nodes and terminals are particularly favored maximizing proximity to suppliers and markets.
� decentralized shopping centers are being developed following road improvement and increased car ownership.
� modern manufacturing industry relies increasingly on heavy road vehicles for long distance transportation and incurs lower transport costs on the fringes of cities than at more central locations.

B. REVENUE
� retailing revenue is determined by the size of the shopping catchment area or hinterland, not just in terms of population but in terms of purchasing power.
� distribution of the day-time population and points of maximum transit (where people cluster together) are also important.
� in the case of offices, the spatial distribution, number and size of client establishments determine revenue.
� revenue is thus greatest within the CBD and so are the aggregate costs.
…as distance from the center increases, revenue falls and aggregate costs (after falling initially) rises.
…this is due to the upward pull of transport costs, which are no longer offset sufficiently by economies in the use of land and labor.
…only within a fairly short distance from the CBD are commercial users able to realize high profitability.


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C. PROFITABILITY
� to maximize profits, firms need to locate where they can benefit from both the greatest revenue and from the lowest costs.
� specialized functions and activities serving the urban market as a whole will locate centrally.
� firms requiring large sites and those attempting to reduce costs of over-concentration will be attracted to the suburbs.
� firms locating close together to benefit from complementary will incur lower costs because of external economies and enjoy higher revenue due to joint demand.
…since there is a high degree of inertia, most firms find it difficult to adjust their locations to the optimum.
…a satisfactory rather than ideal location moreover is established by zoning and land use controls.
A mixture of interacting influences usually explain each locational decision.
.....as price mechanism largely decides the profitability or utility of goods and services, it subsequently determines the location of activity and the spatial structure of the urban area supplying these goods and services
.....high levels of accessibility within the CBD are reflected in low transport cost attracting greatest demand for commercial sites
.....conversely, low over-all accessibility and high transport cost outside urban areas will attract a much lower level of demand.
.....other possible influences: changes in population, technology and transportation, pressures from redeveloped central areas and local and central government policy.

D. LOCATION
A factor which, as propagated by the adage “location, location, location” is considered to be the foremost determinant in the catalyzing of the decision to purchase.

True in the practice of conventional suburban development

Downside being that a preexistence of excellence in location is
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invariably associated with high cost of land acquisition

Created by proximity to a desirable factor such as transportation, a waterfront, a slope, a long vista, a pleasant climate, a popular resort, or a desirable community

Only method to economically achieve the value added by location is to create it on inexpensive land through Planned Neighborhood Development.





STUDY QUESTIONS:
1. Describe the location theory of Johann Heinrich von Thunen.
2. Describe the location theory of William Alonso.
3. What are the locational determinants of commercial and industrial use.

EKISTICS THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN SETTLEMENTS

2.0 EKISTICS THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN SETTLEMENTS

At the end of the lesson the students must be able to:
1. Understand the origin of ekistics
2. Connect the past ekistics or human settlement to the present one.
3. Understand better the ekistics of the present then renew or connect it to the future.
Human settlements are no longer satisfactory for their inhabitants…

�economically speaking
- don’t have the means to satisfy their basic needs
- remain homeless or live in houses of very low quality
�social point of view
- man appears to be lost in the big cities
- feels abandoned by progress in many small towns/villages
�political level
- new types of societies and new types of people have not found their corresponding political institution.
�technical point of view
- most settlements don’t have the facilities indispensable to their proper functioning in spite of the technological achievements
�aesthetically
- the ugliness of human settlements around

creating better conditions for tomorrow can be understood better if we look into the different elements of the human settlements…
Human Settlements & their Elements

Human settlements are settlements inhabited by man. Human settlements should satisfy man.
Human settlements consist of:
a. the CONTENT (man, alone or in societies)
b. the CONTAINER (or the physical settlement, which consists both natural and man-made or artificial elements)
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When taken together make up the human settlement whose largest possible dimensions are defined by the geographic limits of the earths surface.

The total surface of the Earth:
�the largest possible container of man
�the whole cosmos of man
�the cosmos of the anthropos
�the anthropocosmos

Such definition of human settlement implies that it is not merely 3-dimensional but 4-dimensional. . .
- man & society change continuously and by so doing, create functions which unlike shells (which can be conceived in 3-dimensional terms) require a fourth dimension ---TIME in order to be carried out
- a 3-dimensional conception of a settlement is very like a film which suddenly stops and arrest all the figures in their movements. A still photograph of a building looks real only if there are no human figures in the pictures; if people have been arrested in the process of walking in front of the building, then the picture is frozen, unreal.


A human settlement needs both categories of elements in order to
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come into existence…
� man alone or in groups, if not settled anywhere cannot be said to form a settlement or even a part of one.
� once he does settle somewhere even temporary, we have a temporary, elementary settlement in which a pattern of relationship between man and his container comes into existence for a certain period of time (one day, many days, or one season) regardless of whether the container is a natural one ( a cave) or man-made (tent or a building).
Nature alone, without man, cannot be said to form a settlement or even a container, since it has no human content…
� a man-made settlement is only the corpse or the abandoned shell of a settlement, which must be considered dead as in any other corpse.
� some people call dead settlement a “settlement” but this is no more correct calling the shell of a snail a snail.
� term is used in many such cases for reasons of simplicity, but this is not accurate and should be used with care to avoid confusion.

2 basic elements of human settlements (Doxiadis)
THE CONTENT AND THE CONTAINER
This can be further subdivided into 5 categories (in hierarchical order)
(Container)� NATURE – providing the foundation upon which the settlement is created and the frame within it can function
(Content)� MAN – an individual, Homo Sapiens
- biological needs (oxygen, nutrition)
- sensation and perception (5 senses)
- emotional needs (satisfaction, security, sense of belonging)
- moral values
(Content)� SOCIETY – a group of individuals sharing the same culture, values, norms, and traditions
(Container)� SHELLS or the structures within which man lives and carries out his different functions, the built component.
(Container)� NETWORKS or the natural and man-made system which facilitate the functioning of the settlement, or links within
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the settlement, roads, communications systems, utilities, etc.

Hierarchy of human settlements…
� a hamlet, a neighborhood, a small village
� a community, a town
� a city, an urban area
� a metropolis
� a conurbation – a composite of cities, metropolises, urban areas
� a megalopolis – merging of two or more metropolises with a population of 10M or more; a 20th century phenomenon (Megalopolis - concept coined by Jean Gottmann for urban complexes in the Northeastern United States.)

… a hierarchy of settlements is characterized by a few large cities, some medium-sized cities, and many small settlements.

INTRODUCTION: HUMANS IN THEIR ECOLOGICAL SETTING

1.0 INTRODUCTION: HUMANS IN THEIR ECOLOGICAL SETTING
At the end of the lesson the students must be able to:
1. Understand the relationship of human and their natural, social and built environment.
2. Learn the different human ecological concepts.


Human ecology is the interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary study of the relationship between humans and their natural, social, and built environments.

Ecology as a discipline was technically born when Ernst Haeckel used the word "oekologie" in 1866 to describe the study of an organism’s relationship to its environment. Ecology was revolutionary at this time because it encouraged interdisciplinarity within the sciences—it created a bridge between the physical sciences and the biological sciences in order to study systems of both biotic and abiotic factors.

Human ecology is composed of concepts from ecology like interconnectivity, community behavior, and spatial organization. From the beginning, human ecology was present in geography and sociology, but also in biological ecology and zoology. However, it was the social scientists who applied ecological ideas to humans in a rigorous way. Throughout the 20th century, few biological ecologists really tackled human ecology, but they tended to focus on humans’ impact on the biotic world----which is only half of the picture. Paul Sears is the perfect example of this, an ecologist who realized the disastrous effects that humans were having on the environment and called for human ecology to act as a means to solve them. However, some social scientists expanded human ecology to include also the physical environment's impact on people.

It is interesting to note that although social scientist human ecologists got their ideas from biological ecologists, these early biological ecologists had originally adapted social concepts to the natural world. These concepts that transcended disciplines and passed from the social to the biological and back to the social are the basis for human ecology.

The academic foundations of a human ecology can be attributed to the sociology department at the University of Chicago and to the work of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess’ 1921 book Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Park and Burgess used ecological concepts like those from Frederick Clements and Charles Darwin to describe human systems, specifically focusing on cities. Their student, Roderick McKenzie also played an important role in solidifying human ecology as a sub-discipline within the Chicago school. They emphasized that the difference between human ecology and the ecology of other organisms is that human societies are organized on not only the biotic level but the cultural level as well.

Human ecology as human-environment interactions is an ancient idea in geography. In the modern era, the term appears as early as 1908 in the discipline (Titles and Abstracts of Papers Presented to the Association from 1904 to 1910, Inclusive). Harlan Barrows addresses the topic in his presidential speech to the Association of American Geographers in 1923. Barrows’ speech is an attempt to redefine geography as the science of human ecology, emphasizing its study of humans’ relationships with the land instead of just a regional study of the physical land.

In the early 1950s anthropologists, led by Julian H. Steward, began to further develop this human ecological study of culture, asserting that it is the intermediary between humans and their environments and what makes humans unique. Anthropologists had long been interested in humans’ direct relationships with their environments so it was easy for them to incorporate human ecology into their discipline.

Psychological ecology was also developing at the same time—a field that expanded a person’s “environment” to include their mental representation of it and focused on studying people’s behavior under field conditions instead of in a controlled laboratory setting. Kurt Lewin emphasized that the “ecology” of this mental world was the study of relations within consciousness, dramatically shifting the term but further expanding the realm of human ecology.
Ecological ideas also showed up in economics, with Kenneth E. Boulding being the strongest proponent for integrating the two disciplines that share semantic origins (“eco” meaning house). Boulding drew parallels between ecology and economics, most generally in that they are both studies of individuals as members of a system, and indicated that the “household of man” and the “household of nature” could somehow be integrated to create a perspective of greater value.[9][10]
In the late 1960s, ecological concepts started to become integrated into the applied fields, namely architecture, landscape architecture, and planning. Ian McHarg called for a future when all planning would be “human ecological planning” by default, always bound up in humans’ relationships with their environments. He emphasized local, place-based planning that takes into consideration all the “layers” of information from geology to botany to zoology to cultural history.

In these early years, human ecology was still deeply enmeshed in its respective disciplines: geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and economics. Through the 1970s and 80s scholars like Gerald L. Young and Britta Jungen began to call for a greater integration between all of the scattered disciplines that had each established some kind of ecological thinking. It was clear that throughout the 20th century human ecology was solidly multidisciplinary, in that it included people from a vast variety of disciplines, but it had not yet become interdisciplinary. During the 1970s and 80s this slowly began to change as more interdisciplinary programs, institutions, and organizations became founded focusing on human ecology.

Many people have contributed to the study of human ecology. The following are some of the most influential scholars:
• Harlan H. Barrows was a geographer who considered human ecology to be the unique field of geography. Barrows regarded human ecology as the relation between geography and the environment and divides it into three areas: economic geography (what people need and want), political geography (relating to organizations), and social geography (connections between people
• Robert Ezra Park was an urban sociologist who considered human ecology as the study of the relationship between biotic balance and social equilibrium. He emphasized the cultural structure of human society which he separated into groups: ecological, economic, political, and moral.
• Kurt Lewin, a psychologist, worked for the US government during World War II to change people's attitudes toward rationing. In his study, he used "the environment" to describe the mental environment, expanding human ecology into the world of the mind.
• Kenneth E. Boulding, an economist, saw a strong correlation between economics and ecology based around five basic similarities between the two: 1) Both study individuals as members of a species (for ecology, populations of individuals, and for economics, populations of commodities). 2) Both have a concept of equilibrium (for ecology, an equilibrium of populations, and for economics, an equilibrium of price systems). 3) Both involve a system exchange among their various individuals and species that is important in determining equilibrium. 4) Both imply some concept of development. 5) Both are subject to their equilibriums distorted by policy (for ecology, agriculture, and for economics, government).[15]
• As an anthropologist, Julian Steward emphasized the role that culture has in explaining the nature of human societies. He considered human society to be dictated by much more than the immediate physical environment and biotic assemblage. The nature of local group is determined by both local adaptations and larger institutions.
• Roderick D. McKenzie was a sociologist associated with the University of Chicago. McKenzie believed human ecology to be concerned with the process of spatial grouping of interacting human beings or of interrelated human institutions.
• Gerald L. Young was an influential player in the development of Human Ecology. He was the fourth president of Society for Human Ecology (SHE) and is considered one of SHE’s founders. Young is a recognized leader in pulling together the field of human ecology for his scholarly publications in human ecology, including “Origins of Human Ecology” and “The Shadows of Consumption: Consequences for the Global Environment."
• Ian McHarg was a landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning.
• Rusong Wang, an urban systems ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, defines human ecology, in Chinese terms as the science of the living state or dynamics of the human being, driven by objective and subjective factors. It involves understanding, planning, and management. According to Wang, Chinese human ecologists are searching for a feasible future for their nation that includes high efficiency, sustainable development, and harmonious relationships between social, economic, and natural systems.
• Dieter Steiner, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, had a vision of how to combat the global environmental crises by integrating the sciences with outside disciplines, understanding our evolutionary past, and developing personal integration and relatedness to the world outside the self. He developed many conceptual frameworks to better visualize how to go about these processes. Along with Markus Nauser, he edited the "Human Ecology: fragments of anti-fragmentary views of the world."
• Gregory Bateson, generally known as a British anthropologist, contributed to human ecology in the realm of the ecology of mind. He was opposed to the way scientists try to reduce everything to matter; his goal was to re-introduce the mind into the equation. He emphasized the importance of looking at the world not just though reductionist logic, but to understand the connections in the "pattern which connects" all of our minds through stories.
• Stephen Vickers Boyden contributed to human ecology while at the Australia National University working on a comprehensive study of Hong Kong's unique human ecological situation. This study was the basis for UNESCO's Man in the Biosphere Program. Biohistory: The Interplay Between Human Society and the Biosphere generated the Hong Kong Human Ecology Programme
• Bonnie McKay is a professor and chair of the department of human ecology at Rutgers University.
• Gary Haq is a Human Ecologist and Senior Research Associate at the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York and often writes for the Yorkshire Post.

Many human ecological concepts come from ecology.
• Perhaps the most fundamental concept of human ecology is interaction, as an assumption that everything interacts with other things and a basis for all further analysis. Interaction is a function of scale, but should be extended to be a function of diversity and complexity.
• Levels of integration is the concept that entities are organized on levels of different scale for better analysis, for example from the level of the molecule, the individual, the family, the community, the population, the biosphere, or the universe.
• Human ecology expands functionalism from ecology to the human mind. People's perception of a complex world is a function of their ability to be able to comprehend beyond the immediate, both in time and in space. This concept manifested in the popular slogan promoting sustainability: "think global, act local." Moreover, people's conception of community stems from not only their physical location but their mental and emotional connections and varies from "community as place, community as way of life, or community of collective action."
• Diversity and stability are contentious topics in ecology; current research shows that ecosystems are less stable than originally thought and high diversity does not immediately translate into high stability. These have not often been applied to human ecology.
• Systems analysis is one way to understand human ecology, however many topics are more complex and it is important to realize that systems analysis is only one way to understand them and fairly simplified. Most systems are not closed and therefore require simplification in order to study them.
• Spatial analysis is essential to human ecology because many of the problems of relations between humans and their environments are physical.
• A gestalt perspective or holistic viewpoint is important to human ecology because it recognizes that we can gain understanding of a system by looking at it as a whole.
• Monodisciplinary: Studies focusing on one specific area. Most institutions of higher learning award degrees based on monodisciplinary majors intended to prepare students for work in a specific discipline.
• Multidisciplinary: A variety of subjects studied concurrently. A liberal arts degree requires students to study a variety of subjects in order to prepare them to be effective citizens in a complex society.
• Interdisciplinary: Integration between disciplines. A human ecological education integrates ideas from different disciplines in order to better addressing complex problems dealing with human/environment (whether social, physical, or mental) interactions.
• Transdisciplinary: A perspective that transcends disciplines. A human ecological education goes beyond integrating different disciplines, creating a worldview that assumes an inherent connectivity when better addressing problems relating to human/environment interactions, but still relying on solid disciplinary foundation.




STUDY QUESTIONS:
1. What is human ecology ?
2. What are the different human ecological concepts?

HISTORY OF URBAN SETTLEMENT

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LECTURE: history of urban settlement


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HISTORICAL VIEW AND INFLUENCES

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LECTURE: historical view and influences


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COMPREHENSIVE DEVELOPMENT PLAN

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LECTURE: comprehensive development plan


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PRINCIPLES OF PLANNING

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LECTURE: principles of planning


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