Search

Minimizing travel in the urban environment facilitates the development of sustainable cities. A key aspect is that there is a wide supply of amenities and facilities in the neighbourhoods: if most of the needs of families, goods and services can be covered from the sub-centers of the residential areas, it will be possible to reduce daily intra-urban mobility. The objective of this work is to propose a ranking multicriteria method that facilitates the choice of an ideal residential location in terms of neighbourhood characteristics, especially in the search of sustainable mobility for each family characteristics. One of the main problems in several Multiple Criteria Decision Making methods is the assignment of criteria weights in the aggregation process. The proposed methodology in this paper, Un-weighted TOPSIS (UW-TOPSIS) is able to overcome that problem. In this Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method the relative proximity of each decision alternative to an ideal solution is minimized for the un-known weights of the criteria which are the variables in the corresponding mathematical programming program. Thus, a ranking based on the relative proximity of each alternative to an ideal alternative is obtained without the a priori establishment of the criteria weights. The use of subjective weights in real decision making contexts, where for instance a ranking of alternatives is required, is subject to important criticisms. This could be the case of the ranking of neighbourhoods based on their sustainability.

Forecasting economic values in administrative units provides very important information for political, institutional and economic agents for their respective planning processes. A crucial stage is the choice of the econometric method to obtain these future values taking into account the diversity and complexity of real economy. Two aspects may be considered when choosing an econometric specification. Firstly, disparities in economic development and welfare within countries (i.e., at the regional level) are often bigger than between countries (Elhorst 1995; Taylor and Bradley 1997; Ertur and Le Gallo 2003; Patuelli 2007; see, for example, the cases of Germany and Spain), and they often show typical geographical/spatial structures. Secondly, with regard to regional unemployment disparities, policy makers need, in order to correctly target their actions and policies, to understand two aspects of such disparities: (a) the determinants of ‘equilibrium’ unemployment and its variation; and, (b) the region-specific and the cross-regional dynamics of unemployment. On the one hand, the need for an explicit consideration of the existence of spatial interdependence in econometric models, which is consistent with regional science theories asserting the importance of spatial linkages in local economic processes, led to what is nowadays quite a large literature of empirical papers. On the other hand, the temporal perspective of the problem has attracted less attention in spatial models, but should be considered jointly.