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Numerous studies have found that jobs, amenities, and location influence housing prices in urban areas. However, there is still a lack of in-depth understanding of the impacts of these factors on various housing submarkets within a city. With the case study of Xiamen, this paper investigates the impacts of jobs, amenities, and location on four housing submarkets, classified by owner-occupied and rental housing, in inner and outer districts. The hedonic model, Chow test, and Tiao-Goldberger test are applied to analyze differentiation in the determinants of housing prices between four submarkets. The results show that all submarkets are influenced by blue-collar jobs (which have negative effects) and seascape (which has a positive impact). Besides, differentiated after submarkets show that school districts and public transportation have a greater influence on owner-occupied markets than on rental markets. A heterogeneity exists between inner-district and outer-district markets. For instance, bus rapid transit (BRT) has a positive effect on housing and rental prices in the outer districts but not in the inner districts. These differences are mainly caused by the disparities of spatial quality, economic development, and public facilities and amenities. The findings have profound implications for decision-making and planning practices.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies, as new forms of planning support systems (PSSs), are becoming increasingly vital to planning. However, there is a lack of empirical research on factors influencing VR’s supportive role from a user perspective, thus producing barriers to VR’s advancement in planning practices. This neglect motivates the focus of this study, in which we adapt relevant PSS theory to build a conceptual framework that examines factors influencing VR performance in an experience-based environment. Empirical data are gathered predominantly through students’ experiences with and evaluation of the “Viewing the Western Hills at Yinding Bridge” ( Yinding Guanshan) VR Project—a VR system developed to optimize the view corridor of Beijing’s Western Hills. The results show large variability in factors influencing VR performance. In general, the effects of six factors are significant, including 3D visualization, simulating real-world scenes, user-friendliness, interactivity, inspiring participants’ enthusiasm, and inspiring creative thinking. These factors are attributed to the functionality, usability and innovativeness dimensions of VR systems. This study concludes that to realize the supportive and useful role of VR in planning, at minimum, these six factors should be explicitly taken into account.

Climate change will affect the way cities work substantially. Flooding and urban heating are among the most tangible consequences in cities around the globe. Extreme hydro-meteorological events will likely increase in the future due to climate change. Making cities climate-resilient is therefore an urgent challenge to sustain urban living. To adapt cities to the consequences of climate change, new ideas and concepts need to be adopted. This oftentimes requires action from different stakeholder groups and citizens. In other words, climate adaptation of cities needs governance. Facilitating such urban governance for climate adaptation is thus a big and increasing challenge of urban planning. Smart tools and its embedding in smart urban governance is promising to help in this respect. To what extent can the use of digital knowledge technologies in a collaborative planning setting be instrumental in facilitating climate adaptation? This question entails visualising effects of climate adaptation interventions and facilitating dialogue between governments, businesses such as engineering companies, and citizens. The aim of this thematic issue is to explore how the application of technologies in urban planning, embedded in smart urban governance, can contribute to provide climate change adaptation. We understand smart urban governance in this context both in terms of disclosing technical expert information to the wider public, and in terms of supporting with the help of technologies the wider governance debates between the stakeholders involved. The contributions reflect this dual focus on socio-technical innovations and planning support, and therefore include various dimensions, from modelling and interacting to new modes of urban governance and political dimensions of using technologies in climate change adaptation in urban areas.

Over the past decade, the dominant entrepreneurial form of urban governance has seriously hindered the transformation of cities by neglecting the role of urban contexts in shaping governance structures and outcomes. To promote alternatives, this article presents a sociotechnical framework for smart urban governance. This framework explicitly examines the impacts of urban contexts on the sociotechnical interaction between urban technological innovation and urban governance in the realm of smart cities. Three real-world cases were used to demonstrate how the framework can be applied in different urban contexts. The results show that the alleged smartness in smart urban governance by no means implies the simple acceptance, adoption, and use of technology; instead, it needs to be conditionate. For successful smart urban governance, urban technological innovation should be effectively attuned to the wider urban actors and preexisting urban challenges (i.e., the urban governance process), with a special focus on the urban context.

Over the past decade, two dominant perspectives prevail on the governance of smart cities. From a public administration perspective, ‘smart governance’ emphasizes the importance of technology-based tools in transforming government institutions. From an urban planning perspective, the governance of smart cities focuses on the institution interaction with spatial challenges. Within this backdrop, these perspectives can learn from each other to arrive at new transformative smart governance approaches. This paper proposes a specific urban planning perspective on smart governance, labeled as ‘smart urban governance’. It is aiming specifically at the transformative governance of the socio-spatial context of urban challenges associated to smart cities via technological innovations and opening up new possibilities for city transformation. To this end, the meaning of smart urban governance is conceptualized from three dimensions: purposes, components and contexts. Based on a systematic literature review, these three dimensions are integrated into one holistic framework. A case illustration was applied to demonstrate the use and advantages of this framework. From this, this paper concludes that smart urban governance, by explicitly taking into account the specific socio-spatial context, can improve our understanding of the urban challenges associated to smart cities and contribute to its appropriate and ‘smart’ governance.

The world is on the cusp of advancing to a sixth wave of technologically based innovation, which will significantly impact our rapidly-growing urban environments. However, political and social resistance hold us back from the transformational potential of technological innovation, to empower both urban decision-makers and citizens to make informed choices about their urban futures. This volume brings together a collection of chapters that encapsulates the state-of the-art research in data driven methods for harnessing the potential of computational planning and management for smart cities. The scholarly works are organised around three thematic lenses: (I) smart cities and their data and governance; (II) computational planning of smart cities; and (III) mobility and transportation modelling . Each chapter addresses the potential of technologically based innovation in urban environments and provides innovative methods and a series of research findings to guide cities in harnessing its potential. This volume provides an important contribution to the body of knowledge interfacing data, technology and smart cities as we strive to plan more liveable, sustainable and productive cities of the future. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Smart governance has been increasingly gaining momentum to deal with the challenges of fast urbanization in China. However, only limited English literature is available to enhance our understanding of Chinese smart governance. In this chapter, special emphasis is put on our transformative understanding of smart governance in China by identifying the impacts of urban context on smart governance arrangements from an urban planning perspective. As such, we concentrate on smart governance projects in different Chinese cities, foremost based on Chinese literature. We aim to investigate: (1) what smart governance means in Chinese urban planning settings, and (2) how urban context influences the smart governance projects in different Chinese cities. On the basis of an intensive review of Chinese literature on smart governance, we find that smart governance in China varies significantly. Therein, we can identify four types of smart governance in China, including: (1) constructing a pilot area, (2) improving government performance, (3) building trust in government, and (4) encouraging innovation. A comparative exploration of four Chinese projects representing these four types of smart governance shows that the urban context affects the interaction between technology and urban actors. Moreover, it shows that this interaction has a feedback effect on the urban context itself. From this we can conclude that knowledge on the urban context is vital to understand the expected outcomes of intended smart governance arrangements.

In recent years, the widespread use of social media has generated new and big datasets and provided new platforms for urban planning. However, existing studies have often been case-specific or focused on a specific planning domain, leaving the role of social media in urban planning generally questioned. This study conducts a systematic review of to which extent social media can be used in urban planning. There are two main findings. On the one hand, social media data have been increasingly used for urban analysis and modelling, often combined with conventional and new datasets. The domains of application include individual activity patterns, urban land use, transportation behavior, and landscape. On the other hand, social media have provided a new platform for participation, communication and collaboration. They provide new opportunities for cities to hear the voices of distinctive social groups, even those who do not formally participate in planning processes. In recent years, citizens have used social media to initiate and organize themselves collective actions in planning practices. Issues of using social media data in urban planning include population and spatial biases, privacy issues, and difficulties in extracting useful information out of the social media data. It is necessary to pay more attention to the proper dealing with these issues during the collection and methodological handling of social media data.

Whether environmental values are helpful to stimulate people’s pro-environmental behaviour is a debatable issue, in particular when it comes to purchasing green dwellings. This article employs the means-end theory to explore whether environmental values matter in green home-buying in Nanjing China. It systematically compares two groups of home-buyers. The target group bought a green apartment and the control group a conventional one. We investigated the differences between these two groups in the relative importance and underlying personal values of six green attributes: energy and water efficiency, thermal and sound insulation, ventilation and non-toxic construction materials. Results show that not only conventional but also green residents have limited environmental values, and that health and comfort are the important values driving consumers’ green choices. Raising environmental values might be less effective than expected to persuade consumers to buy green apartments. Policy makers might consider stressing health and comfort of green apartments to up-scale green construction.

Economic restructuring and the dramatic expansion of higher education have generated large migration flows of skilled employees to Chinese cities. The residential mobility of skilled migrants has a large impact on the operation of housing and labour markets and the (re)production of social inequities. In this paper we examine the effects of life-course trajectories and institutional factors on the residential mobility of skilled migrants, in comparison with local skilled workers in Nanjing, using a retrospective survey conducted in 2012. Results show that skilled migrants have a higher level of residential mobility than their local counterparts, and that this difference arises from the locals’ early entry into homeownership. Yet, migrants and locals also share similarities: market factors that are closely related to household, labour, and housing careers are decisive in explaining the residential mobility of skilled workers, indicating that life-course theories are also applicable in the Chinese context. The impacts of traditional institutional factors, such as hukou , employer type, and Chinese Communist Party membership, are of a much smaller magnitude, indicating that markets have become dominant institutions in China. Keywords: residential mobility, skilled migrants, Nanjing

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are geo-information based tools to support planning. Since the term PSS appeared for the first time in the late 1980s it has evolved into a serious academic subfield. In this debate, little systematic attention has been paid to the added value of PSS for planning practice. In particular the perspective of users requires more empirical attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by answering the question: What is the practitioner’s perception of the added value of PSS? In doing so we first develop a conceptual framework including the most important added values of PSS observed in the literature. Next, we describe an empirical study of the MapTable PSS, a support tool that is relatively frequently used in the Netherlands. Fifteen interviews were conducted and a Group Decision Room workshop was organized in order to systematically gather perceptions of users about the added value of this PSS. Added values that particularly emphasized are improved collaboration and communication among stakeholders, something which resonates with recent trends in planning. The added value of a better informed outcome is, somewhat surprisingly, considered less important. In order to deepen our understanding, we recommend more research in different contexts and with different tools.

Planning is both an interdisciplinary and a collaborative endeavour. A range of disciplines are involved in planning, which arguably all have a specific frame through which they perceive reality and address planning issues. Three main disciplinary frames can be discerned: analytical, design and negotiation. Within this context, increasing usage is made of planning support systems (PSS), which are integrated sets of tools, often digital, aiming to support different tasks in the planning process. PSS arguably have the potential to support the planning process by facilitating interdisciplinary learning processes, involving “frame reflection” by different disciplinary actors. This paper studies this assumption through two case studies in which a PSS was applied in an interdisciplinary setting. It was found that “frame reflection” (double-loop learning) occurred in only one of the two case studies -and that this involved several frictions between disciplines. In the other case study more practical forms of lea...

The role of planning support systems (PSS) in planning practice is still quite restricted, despite explosive growth in the supply of PSS and increased demand from planning practice as a result of the growing complexity of planning tasks. Research in this area must become more focused if this unsatisfactory situation is to be overcome. This can be achieved by developing a coherent research agenda in which the constituting research elements work together in order to rectify the situation as it stands. This paper employs a structured methodology with the aim of realising the start of a PSS research agenda. A number of recommendations for future PSS research can be derived from this tentative agenda. The key recommendation calls for shifting the prime focus from PSS instruments (means) to their support role (goal). When this is achieved, a new and innovative field of study can be established: planning support science.

Radical economic restructuring has resulted in a large flow of skilled migrants into ever-expanding Chinese cities in the past decade. Dreaming of owning a home in the destination city, skilled migrants compete with locals on the housing market. It is important to know how and when people acquire their home and, by the same token, what prevents others from doing so. Based on the life histories of 804 skilled workers in Nanjing and employing event-history analysis, this paper examines the differences in the timing of entry into homeownership between skilled migrants and their local counterparts and identifies the factors in parallel life course careers that contribute to these differences. Results show a delayed but accelerated increase in the homeownership rate for skilled migrants, indicating an assimilation process. Migrants' later entry into homeownership can be attributed foremost to the limited intergenerational transmission of wealth, while restricted knowledge about the local housing market and later partnership also play a role. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the timing of entry into homeownership is largely determined by the availability of financial resources and progression in the life course rather than institutional factors.

Using county-level employment data, we analyse how the spatial concentration of jobs has changed in China's Pearl River Delta (PRD) between 1990 and 2005. Despite unique Chinese policies that exhibit strong influence on the economic landscape, we detect key parallels with the patterns found in classic theories and empirical studies in Western contexts. Total employment has become increasingly concentrated. This aggregate picture hides important sectoral variations though: manufacturing employment has spread out to suburban areas; producer service jobs have increasingly concentrated in metropolitan centres; and consumer and public services have clustered in areas with high aggregate population. We argue that the major forces that are shaping the economic landscape in PRD are the market institutions and development path-dependency. Under the circumstances of an increasingly liberalised market and decentralised government, policy now may function as a dynamic tool to magnify local spatial-economic and historical advantages and to balance uneven regional development.

Urban villages are widespread in many Chinese cities, providing affordable and accessible housing for rural migrants. These urban villages develop rapidly over time to create more housing units and accommodate increasing numbers of residents. This article provides systematic analyses of urban village development in Shenzhen in the period 1999-2009. It reveals that the development of urban villages was driven by the overall planning and urban growth of the city, which resulted in significant variation in urban village development at the city scale. Three distinct but overlapping phases were observed: expansion, densification and intensification. The growth of urban villages was spatially clustered and changes over time in the distribution of growth centres suggest the possible diffusion of migrant employment out of the Special Economic Zone into two outer districts. In the recent urban regeneration process, the pattern and trend of urban village development is shown to contradict the city's urban village redevelopment programmes. This not only helps to explain the slow progress of the policy implementation, but also implies severe risks of jeopardizing the migrant housing market in certain urban sections.

The sprawl-versus-containment debate relates to many different aspects of the broad concept of sustainability, and as such the answers found by research are rarely decisive, compact cities have advantages in some respects, but disadvantages in others. The present study focuses on the patterns of urbanization process in Netherlands as a whole and within the “Green Heart” in particular. The present study finds over the last decades, the Green Heart is under attack from suburbanization of larger and smaller settlements as several political concessions have been made to local development needs. The Green Heart is also affected by the construction of new roads and railway lines. This infrastructure is built for tangential transport of an increasing volume of commuters. The spatial policies for preserving green spaces suffer from a dilemma between two contradicting functions of green space in a regional context: to be a separator of urban and rural areas and to be an integrator towards the Regional City of “Green Metropolis”.

Brownfields are real property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant (USEPA, 2002). In recent years, there have been a rising number of brownfield redevelopment practices in Chinese cities. However, some redevelopment practices have been unsuccessful in spite of cautious planning whereas others have been successful in the absence of any planning. It is largely due to China’s rapid urbanization on one hand, and inadequate information on the locations and conditions of brownfield on the other. To address the gaps, an integrative methodology is devised based on two frameworks, one for identifying potential instead of actual brownfields, and one for establishing priorities for redevelopment. The first framework identifies potential brownfields through four steps: (1) define input sites; (2) verify environmental liability; (3) confirm tax delinquency; and (4) cross-check with industrial classification code. The second framework prioritize the identified potential brownfield sites with a set of criteria which are selected and weighed based on key interviews and the study of local reference cases. The utility of this methodology is exemplified with the case study of Futian in Shenzhen. Local data including land use data, tax and environmental records of 2005 and the development plan for 2006–2010 are utilized. We conclude that this methodology properly responds to the increasing need of urban planners in making proactive plans for brownfield redevelopment in Chinese cities.

This paper investigates which, how and to what extent land-use related neighbourhood effects play a role in urban dynamics. To justify the use of cellular automata land-use models for spatial policy support, existing neighbourhood rules need to be better founded. This research eliminates a number of uncertainties in the land-use model outcomes by introducing improved empirically founded and regional-specific neighbourhood rules. This allows for a better evaluation and justification of spatial policy scenarios and their effects on future land-use dynamics.

Insight into the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of planning support systems (PSS) is fragmented between users and system developers. The lack of combined insights blocks development in the right direction and makes potential users hesitant to apply PSS in planning. This study presents SWOT of PSS from a combined user–developer perspective. We first express them in terms of combinations of planning task, PSS information function, and user, and subsequently use a literature survey, a series of interviews, and a web survey to gather views from developers, users, and PSS experts. The analysis shows that planners mainly use simple information storage and retrieval systems for exploration tasks, while the majority of PSS are technically much more advanced and aim to support complex tasks. The potential of these advanced PSS can only be realized if planners and system developers start to share knowledge and demands and identify opportunities in a cooperative PSS-development process. Without such a process, the advantages and opportunities of PSS will remain unexploited.

Some 25 years after the introduction of the first geo-information technologies in public organizations, strategies to manage their diffusion are still inadequate. This is problematic in light of the new generation of geo-information technologies that has become available and aims to invest in these new information technologies in order to advance e-government. This study questions how strategies for diffusion of geo-information technologies in public planning organizations can be improved. It shows that classic top-down management often enhances informal diffusion activities that deviate from the formal diffusion strategy. A knowledge management approach, in which geo-information specialists and planners participate in the formation of diffusion policies, can enhance the quality of the formal strategy, thereby preventing deviation and informal diffusion activities. The authors recommend that public planning organizations use this knowledge to improve their diffusion strategies for geo-information technologies.

This paper explores the necessity of using spatial-temporal specific neighbourhood rules for simulation of urban dynamics at a regional level with the help of a Cellular Automata (CA) land-use model (Environment Explorer). Moreover, it explores a method for formulating these spatial-temporal specific neighbourhood rules. Therein, spatial metrics originating from the field of landscape ecology prove to be very useful, in particular the so-called enrichment factor. Analysis of historical data with the help of these spatial metrics revealed evidence of substantial differences in land-use developments between time periods and regions, for example, differences that should be incorporated in land-use models if applied on a more detailed regional scale. In a case study, micro-scale land-use data incorporated in a CA-model were used to analyse and simulate the urban morphological changes over two time periods in four urban regions in the Netherlands. In this study, regional and time-specific neighbourhood rules performed significantly better than a set of generic neighbourhood rules. In contrast, within current practice, most CA land-use modelling makes use of only one uniform set of neighbourhood rules for performing both large area and regional scale land-use simulations. This study questions this common practice and puts it into perspective. Moreover, it indicates some restrictions in the proposed regionalization of the neighbourhood rules; one which is particularly noteworthy is its time-specific dependency of local developments and circumstances.

Over the course of many years, professional planners have used a plethora of methods and tools to support their planning activities. Nevertheless, it can be argued that planning practioners have never fully embraced the much wider diversity of available methods, techniques, and models developed in the research laboratories. On the basis of this observation, this study poses several questions about why there is an apparent mismatch in planning practice between supply, demand, and applications of planning-support instruments (including ‘planning support systems’) and their outcomes (dedicated information and knowledge), and how this mismatch can be solved. In order to arrive at an answer, a conceptual framework is constructed, which constitutes crucial factors that influence the potential planning support roles of information, knowledge, and instruments. With the help of this framework, a developmental overview is interpreted of the theoretical planning traditions that exerted an influence on planning practice during the last half millennium in the Western world. From this interpretation, some lessons can be learned about the improvement of the planning-support role in factual planning practice, and moreover, it opens up some new questions and discussion points.

Planning support systems are a subset of computer-based geo-information instruments, each of which incorporates a unique suite of components that planners can utilise to explore and manage their particular activities. The components may include data sets, computer algorithms and display facilities, as well as more abstract theoretical constructs, knowledge and modelling capabilities. PSS are used to support the planning process by communicating information as well as by generating solutions. An Internet-based inventory was established in 2000–2001 to identify the existence and use of PSS in planning practice worldwide. In this paper we take a closer look at the instruments recorded in the inventory and some of their main characteristics. Some recommendations are made for the development and application of PSS in the future.

The fields of spatial planning, geographical information systems (GIS), and information and communication technology (ICT) are all developing at their own pace and in different directions, thereby obstructing the widespread acceptance of GIS as an integral part of planning practice. In this paper I take a closer look at their divergence and outline the role that a planning support system (PSS) can play in bridging this growing gap. I consider the benefits of participatory planning and show how my prototype of a PSS can contribute to its success. To that end, the functionality of this PSS is described in the context of the initial experience with its application in a diversity of planning circumstances. Some conclusions are then drawn on how a PSS can overcome some of the barriers to GIS support within planning practice.

In the book Spatial Decision Support Systems: Principles and Practices, the authors Ramanathan Sugumaran and John DeGroote provide an up-to-date and comprehensive overview of the various aspects of...

Post-reform China has experienced a huge influx of people into cities coupled with massive urban expansion. As a by-product of these processes, urban villages have emerged and evolved rapidly to satisfy the increasing demand for low-cost housing and a variety of social and economic activities. In many cities, the spatial growth of urban villages represents a large share of total urban growth and has significantly shaped the cities’ land use patterns and residential profiles. In this research, a theoretical and empirical analysis is carried out in order to understand the spatial evolution of all 320 urban villages in Shenzhen over the period 1999–2009. Using exploratory spatial data analysis, multivariate models, and spatial regimes models, this research finds that the growth of urban villages is organic and highly adaptive. Their evolution is driven by the planning and development of the formal city and its resulting social and spatial diversity, and is also linked to their location in the urban fabric. Five major findings have been identified. First, the physical and socioeconomic development of urban villages is the natural and logical response of the indigenous village population and the rural migrants in facing rapid economic development and social transition. Second, the development process of urban villages follows a general trajectory characterised by three distinct but overlapping phases (expansion, densification and intensification). Third, their growth is spatially clustered and their growth centres shift over time, following the diffusion of employment. Fourth, the development of urban villages is driven by the provision of jobs and accessibility to job locations, but it is also confined by physical and institutional constraints such as diminishing land availability and environmental protection plans. Fifth, land use of urban villages evolves and the resulting land use diversity reflects different local conditions for economic activities and development. These processes are found to be faster and more advanced in the central city than in the outer districts. The speed with which any specific village moves along the general development path varies according to its location in the city and its distinctive characteristics.

1. Migrants' Transient Urbanism in Urban China: An introduction Fulong Wu and Fangzhu Zhang Part 1: Migrants' Livelihoods in the City 2. The New Generation Migrant Workers in China C. Cindy Fan and Chen Chen 3. Chinese Cities and Mobile Livelihoods: Migration, risk and social networks Heather Xiaoquan Zhang 4. Outsiders in the City: Migrant housing and settlement patterns Weiping Wu Part 2: Migrants' Social Lives in the City 5. Migrants' Job-search in Urban China: Social networks and the laour market Yu Chen and Gwilym Pryce 6. Situated Translocality in Flux Landscapes: Migrants and urban villages in the city of Guangzhou Cecilie Andersson 7. Migrant Integration in China: Evidence from Guangzhou Bart Wissink, Arjan Hazelzet and Werner Breitung 8. Migrants' Integration in Urban Villages: A case study of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzou Zhigang Li and Fulong Wu Part 3: Migrants' Habitat - Urbanized Villages 9. A tale of Foxconn City: Urban villages, migrant workers and alienated urbanism Daniel You-ren Yang 10. Shanghai's Urban Villages: Migrants, temporary residence and urban redevelopment Mingfeng Wang, Xiaoling Lin, Yuemin Ning 11. Urban Villages as Local Economic Clusters: The case of Zhongda cloth market in Guangzhou Uwe Altrock and Sonia Schoon 12. Spatial Evolution of Urban Villages in Shenzhen Pu Hao, Stan Geertman, Pieter Hooimeijer and Richard Sliuzas Part 4: Migrants' Transient Urbanism - Village Redevelopment 13. 'Three Olds Redevelopment' in Guangzhou Sonia Schoon and Uwe Altrock 14. Symbolic Relations Between Urban Villages and the City: Implication for redevelopment strategies Yanliu Lin, Bruno de Meulder and Shifu Wang 15. Planning for chengzhongcun in Guangzhou and Shenzhen: Redevelopment in the Chinese context Him Chung 16. Conclusion Chris Webster

Sustainable urban development is a critical issue in the Netherlands. The country is densely populated, which causes conflicts between environmental concerns and spatial development. Environmental policy integration is proposed as a way to improve the integration of environmental values into spatial planning with the help of learning processes. This chapter evaluates the extent to which the combination of a map-based touch table and an area-specific environmental profile are of added value to environmental policy integration. The case study is the application of the map-based touch table, called MapTable® for the development of a sustainable neighborhood in the region of Utrecht, the Netherlands. It was found that MapTable® facilitates learning processes by providing a platform for communication among stakeholders from different backgrounds. Nonetheless, it must be ensured that all stakeholders are equally included, and that the process suits the application of a map-based touch table in combination with an area-specific environmental profile.

Planning Support Systems (PSS) are geo-information-technology-based instruments that are dedicated to supporting those involved in planning in the performance of their specific tasks (Batty 1995; Klosterman 1997). The term PSS appeared on the planning scene in the mid-1980s thanks to its progenitor, Britton Harris, although the concept of building instruments dedicated to the support of planning activities dates back much further. In this first introductory chapter a brief demarcation of the concept of PSS will be provided, besides a concise overview of the content of this book on "Planning Support Systems for Sustainable Urban Development".