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AbstractIn limited-resourced Latin-American cities, adapting urban regulations and capturing value offers great potential for developing affordable land. We explored what counts for the significant variance in local land management implementation within Buenos Aires Metropolitan Region. Analysed municipalities successfully developed high-quality instruments to expand affordable land markets. However, local planning effectiveness does not find limits in the quality of planning itself. Depending on the municipalities’ relative location within the metro area, the national-level pipeline infrastructure plans, the politically driven finance choices, and divergent administration protocols favour or hinder the capacity to implement an effective urban land development strategy at local levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are introducing an analysis of the micro and macroeconomic factors associated with the textile industrial decline in the canton of La Maná. Ecuador, unlike similar studies, based on the decline of important industries, we tried to explain the negative factors to execute the Development and Territorial Planning Plan, which aspired for the takeoff of an industry that barely reached 2% participation. We analyzed not considered factors in planning, according to the new data. In the internal component, we particularly observed a management system based on traditional paradigms that did not foster innovation. We concluded about the importance of incorporating into public planning social and cultural programs that promote entrepreneurship, flexibility and the management of social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) is effective for local planning of automated vehicles, especially when there exist dynamical objects and multipe requirements. But it requires many computation resources for numerical optimization, which limits its practical application becase of the limited power of onboard unit. To extend the application range of the NMPC based local planner, the coupled nonlinear vehicle dynamics model is adopted based on the numerical analysis, which conversely requires much more discretization poits for acceptable accuracy. For better computation efficiency, Lagrange polynomials are used to discretize the vehicle dynamics model and objective function with less points and fine numerical accuracy. Furthermore, an adaptive strategy is designed to determine the order of Lagrange polynomials according to running state by numerical analysis of discretization error. Both acceleration effect and performance of the local planner designed by NMPC are validated by experimental tests under scenarios with multiple dynamical obstacles. The test results show that compared with the original one the accuracy and efficiency are improved by 74% and 60%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Architectus is the property of Oficyna Wydawnicza Politechniki Wroclawskiej and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Introduction: On‐demand delivery (<2 h from ordering) of alcohol is relatively new to New Zealand. We aimed to quantify the number of services available and the number of outlets available to purchase from within on‐demand services. We then tested whether access differed by neighbourhood demographics. Methods: We identified six on‐demand alcohol services and quantified access to these in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. Eighty‐one addresses were sampled according to three variables: (i) density of physical alcohol outlet tertile; (ii) socio‐economic deprivation tertile; and (iii) areas within the top 20th percentile of Māori within each city. Results: The median number of alcohol outlets to purchase from across all on‐demand delivery services was five, though this was higher in Christchurch. For all three cities combined, and for Wellington, the number of outlets available on‐demand was highest in areas with the highest density of physical outlets. However, the number of outlets available virtually was not associated with physical outlet density in Auckland or Christchurch. There were no significant differences in access observed for neighbourhood socio‐economic deprivation. Discussion and Conclusions: On‐demand delivery services are changing local alcohol environments, and may be increasing overall access to alcohol at a neighbourhood level. On‐demand access patterns do not consistently reflect the physical alcohol environment. The current legislative and policy environment in New Zealand pre‐dates the emergence of on‐demand alcohol services. Local councils need to consider 'virtual' access as well as physical access when developing Local Alcohol Policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces a novel approach for memoryless local planners, employing depth-based sampling and steering constraints to enhance computational efficiency and planning performance for quadrotors navigating cluttered environments. This approach enables autonomous flight planning without the need for high-level global planners, marking a significant advancement in this field.

Major policy or paradigm shifts to more sustainable development paths present political, economic and social challenges. In Ireland, the experiences of other European states have been used to shift what was a localised development-led planning system towards the incorporation of national and strategic approaches. The transition is from a land-use planning approach with a market-led emphasis based on a local plan making function with regulatory controls. This paper explores the process, factors and inherent difficulties involved in moving from a localized to more integrated and strategic approaches and examines experiences to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) establishes global goals from an action plan at various scales on the south of Latin-American. To pursue this agenda, however, it is necessary to facilitate cooperation between actors, agendas, and urban policies at the localneighbourhood level to enable the progressive transformation that the Agenda projects. The objective of this paper is to propose a methodology that translates these SDGs to the local-neighbourhood scale and to apply it to “Barrio Virgen de Lourdes”, located in San Juan province, Argentina. The study was carried out in a participatory manner, in conjunction with community, academic, and governmental actors. As a result, Urban Sustainability Indicators and action strategies according to neighbourhood SDGs were obtained. In addition, a Sustainable Development Index was designed to assess the impact of actions on the realisation of the SDGs at different levels of government. This methodology represents an effective tool to contribute to sustainable development and social inclusion.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) inventories are widely considered a first step toward climate mitigation and adaptation planning, but progress completing inventories at the local level is often slow. Local governments may lack motivation to carry out inventories when staffing and funding are tight. Articulating the current costs of energy consumption could motivate cash-limited local governments and help justify investments in alternatives. Calculating financial savings of alternatives could further motivate planning. Here we demonstrate an approach to calculate operating costs (and potential savings) for a town in southern New York, using measures of heat consumption and eGallons to calculate expenditures. We find that business-as-usual community energy cost amount to $50–$60 million per year in funds exported from the community, or $10,000–$12,000 per household. By replacing gasoline vehicles with electric vehicles and oil-burning furnaces with heat pumps, the community could save around $20–$33 million per year, or $4400–$7000 per household. Local government operations costs could decline by over $70,000 per year. For a small government, such reductions could have a substantial financial impact. Adding a cost assessment to a standard GHG inventory appears reasonably straightforward, and if implemented broadly, it could increase the speed and effectiveness of GHG inventories and climate action planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) establishes global goals from an action plan at various scales on the south of Latin-American. To pursue this agenda, however, it is necessary to facilitate cooperation between actors, agendas, and urban policies at the localneighbourhood level to enable the progressive transformation that the Agenda projects. The objective of this paper is to propose a methodology that translates these SDGs to the local-neighbourhood scale and to apply it to "Barrio Virgen de Lourdes", located in San Juan province, Argentina. The study was carried out in a participatory manner, in conjunction with community, academic, and governmental actors. As a result, Urban Sustainability Indicators and action strategies according to neighbourhood SDGs were obtained. In addition, a Sustainable Development Index was designed to assess the impact of actions on the realisation of the SDGs at different levels of government. This methodology represents an effective tool to contribute to sustainable development and social inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public perception and knowledge of land use changes, and preferences for future landscape development, can contribute to planning processes at different levels from the local to the national. Participatory processes and use of local knowledge are necessary for precise planning purposes and management of public affairs. This paper analyses the results of sociological research with regard to landscape development in Nová Vieska village in the Podunajská nížina lowland in Slovakia. The survey aimed to analyse the answers of local inhabitants and key stakeholders in the field of perception of land-use changes and their causes and biodiversity changes since 1990, as well as expectations of future land use and the driving forces of rural development. Local inhabitants were more likely to perceive changes in the productive parts of the study area (the decline of orchards and gardens, overgrowth of meadows and pastures, etc.), while key stakeholders perceived a broader range of changes in land use. According to the local inhabitants, the disintegration of cooperative farms was the main cause of the land use changes, and unsettled land ownership is the biggest obstacle to development of agricultural production. Key stakeholders cited economic, environmental (climate change) and social causes (ageing of population, change of life style, etc.) as the most important factors in land use change and they also perceived them as the most important obstacles for agricultural development. Local inhabitants (as well as key stakeholders) wished for an increase of the proportion of managed meadows and pastures, gardens, orchards, wetlands and non-forest vegetation, but they expect the opposite trend. The results confirmed that public knowledge of landscape development could provide substantial useful information for future development planning.

The following paper examines urban and territorial planning in Italy, where decision-making is entrusted almost exclusively to the almost 8000 small municipalities present in the country. Plans for and the transformation of built-up areas, infrastructure and social services of all types, and serving all purposes in a national territory of more than 300,000 square kilometers, are controlled by a multitude of Mayors, Boards and Municipal Councils that govern plots of land consisting of polygons of a few kilometers per side. This is generally achieved using urban planning tools developed without any general rule or protocol. Often, most of their content is even ignored as a result of national legislation that weakens them, making them largely irrelevant. This is a European example of urban mismanagement that should be brought to the wider attention of the European technical–scientific community because the debate developed so far on this topic—even by eminent and authoritative urban planners—has been almost entirely published in Italian only. Public and political attention around the issue is still extremely limited, although the serious effects of this "molecular planning" are beginning to be perceived: unjustified overurbanization and very disorganized, extremely energy-intensive and ecosystemically destructive urban layouts that are completely at odds with the public interests of environmental and urban quality. In the following paper, we make some comparisons with other European countries and outline some possible directions—certainly very difficult to follow—to rethink and remedy these negative effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how local plans regulate residential development in Australia, where there has been intense concern over housing supply and affordability. Drawing on repeat surveys of the content of local land-use plans, the study asks: What are the main objectives and mechanisms for residential development control within local plans? To what extent do plans enable or constrain diverse and affordable housing? And how does the content of local plans vary between municipalities and over time? The study finds that newer plans are more likely to contain objectives for housing diversity, but few include specific mechanisms to deliver affordable homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender is considered the most universal form of inequality. Therefore, a just and sustainable development cannot, and should not, be conceived without gender equality (GE), as recognized by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Several Latin American countries are making subs- tantial progress in terms of critical aspects of GE. For Colombia, the path towards gender equality starts from nationwide mandatory laws to be implemented at the local level. In this study, it is used data collected for a Convergent Parallel Mixed Method to conduct a comprehensive assessment of efforts towards GE in Colombian municipalities. Data collected are employed from the municipal de- velopment plans (PDMs), cities’ websites, and archival material. In this paper, I mainly present the results of the qualitative phase that uses a Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA). Results indicate that efforts towards GE in Colombian municipalities are portrayed through programs and initiatives to address the internationally recognized women’s agenda.

In this paper, a new path tracker is proposed for autonomous robots by re-designing a classical obstacle avoidance algorithm “Follow the Gap Method (FGM)”. Until now, FGM is not used to track a global plan of consecutive waypoints dynamically yet. On the other hand, this is a very fundamental requirement for autonomous robots. To use the FGM as a dynamic tracker, the proposed methodology is borrowing the “Look Ahead Distance” (LAD) from geometric path tracking methods and adapting it to the local planner. The LAD is defined as the distance from the robot to the desired waypoint on the path to be tracked. In the proposed solution, a dynamic and optimized LAD for the local planner is defined which is automatically adjusted by the robot velocity. The dynamic LAD function is optimized to increase tracking, avoidance, and comfort capabilities. This study is the first one that uses FGM together with a global planner as part of a whole autonomous system. Another novelty of the paper is the optimization of LAD. In this study, the LAD is optimized by taking into account not only the tracking error but also the distance to obstacle and comfort metrics simultaneously, for the first time in literature. The optimization is performed with various weight coefficients in the cost function. Three metrics are used to compare the effect of weight coefficients on the optimization. These metrics are the Root Mean Square (RMS) values of “Distance to Path”, “Distance to Obstacle” and “Magnitude of Total Acceleration”. For instance according to the experiments, when the tracking coefficient is doubled in optimization, the distance to path metric comes from 0,424m to 1,23m, indicating that the robot is tracking better. Similar effects on other metrics are observed when the related coefficients are changed. Besides the simulations, real-world experiments are performed on the real autonomous wheelchair platform to show the real-time performance of the proposed approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation of ordinary people in shaping the developmental priorities at the local level is often regarded as a vehicle to enhance the quality of local development policies, plans, and programmes. This study empirically examines a Nepali case of municipal-level development planning process to understand how ordinary people were offered participation opportunities through informal forums. Findings suggest that informal forums can be conducive for articulating the presence and voice of ordinary citizens in the local development planning process. The study contributes to the participatory development literature by showcasing a relatively successful case of incorporating ordinary people in local development planning process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a local planning approach that is targeted for pseudo-omnidirectional vehicles: that is, vehicles that can drive sideways and rotate on the spot. This local planner—MSDU–is based on optimal control and formulates a non-linear optimization problem formulation that exploits the omni-motion capabilities of the vehicle to drive the vehicle to the goal in a smooth and efficient manner while avoiding obstacles and singularities. MSDU is designed for a real platform for mobile manipulation where one key function is the capability to drive in narrow and confined areas. The real-world evaluations show that MSDU planned paths that were smoother and more accurate than a comparable local path planner Timed Elastic Band (TEB), with a mean (translational, angular) error for MSDU of (0.0028 m, 0.0010 rad) compared to (0.0033 m, 0.0038 rad) for TEB. MSDU also generated paths that were consistently shorter than TEB, with a mean (translational, angular) distance traveled of (0.6026 m, 1.6130 rad) for MSDU compared to (0.7346 m, 3.7598 rad) for TEB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the intersection between degrowth and urban planning and contributes to a deeper understanding and a sharper concretisation of how a strong sustainability concept such as degrowth can be taken into planning practice. Taking the Swedish municipality of Södertälje as a case, this paper uses empirical material from interviews with municipal urban planners and urban planning policy. The findings put current planning in relation to degrowth ideas, gather insights about the possible role of planning actors in a degrowth transition, and includes proposals for how planning practice can facilitate a degrowth future. This study finds that integrating a degrowth approach in planning practice means that urban planning needs to be subordinated to overarching social and environmental goals. Producing urban planning that is measured and conditioned by overarching goals would most likely imply completely different ways of planning, and goal-oriented backcasting scenarios are suggested as a tool to overcome this challenge. This paper also gathers strategies, like Södertälje's Cultivation Strategy, that can facilitate a degrowth transition within current planning practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last years, the implementation of large tourism behaviour surveys organized at national level has been generalized in many countries. However, since many of the tourism policies are decided at a local level, regional planners and managers frequently question the usefulness of these national surveys when, in fact, the number of available surveys representing their regions is too small to get a representative view of the tourists' profiles in their specific destination or business. This work presents and applies small area techniques to overcome the problem of obtaining estimators of certain variables of interest for very specific market segments, taking advantage of the cross-information that defines the segment. To illustrate the technique, the Spanish Household Budget Survey is considered, in particular, two specific categories, related to tourism spending, illustrating the potential of the methodology in travel and tourism planning. The results show the possibility of extracting expenditure information in market segments even in the absence of sample observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To do territorial planning, we need several maps referring to different layers of information necessary to represent the territory according to a vast set of variables. At the Portuguese municipal level, the municipal master plan (PDM – plano diretor municipal) is the territorial management tool responsible for long-term territorial planning and ordering. Since the PDM will constrain the citizens' lives, it should be of easy access and interpretation. However, due to its large amount of information, it is often hard for them to understand what is presented using only static cartographic elements. Comparing 60 Web sites that present geographical information for a wider public, we found that narrative, visual, and interactive elements and data presentation in flexible portions with the necessary information for partitioning, browsing, or querying made the data more engaging. This flexibility is particularly important with large data sets, where decreasing the level of complexity is vital for proper understanding and analysis. We found that geoportals dedicated to territorial public policies lack narrative elements that would improve comprehension. Since it is difficult for the general public to understand the strategy the municipality wants to implement, the desired public participation, although possible, will return poor results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2015, policies for resettling asylum seekers and refugees in European cities have renewed the debate over the governance of migration, while not only metropolises but also small towns and mid-sized cities emerge as, although not new, at least specific arrival spaces. National dispersion policies are assigning these asylum seekers and refugees to small and mid-sized cities that are presumed to provide housing opportunities. However, little is known about access to housing and residential trajectories in these specific urban and socio-economic contexts. This article analyses how the housing providers—either state agencies, managers of temporary accommodation centres or social housing organisations—are adjusting to the arrival and needs of asylum seekers and refugees in cities where there is usually less ethnic diversity. We demonstrate that access to housing and residential trajectories tends to be determined by dispersion and mainstream social mix policies, from national to local arrangements. However, we argue that some pragmatic local practices have reframed this pattern to provide housing solutions that may be contrary to national policies. Our article will be based on 84 in-depth interviews conducted with housing providers, NGOs and with asylum seekers and refugees in three small and mid-sized French cities.

Given the large economic and political importance of local social communities (ie local self-governments - municipalities and cities), each country has always taken particular care with their work and development. Local development, with its most delicate and leading role in planning, has a prominent place in this. However, the acceleration of the democratization of society in recent decades, caused by the progressive spread of science and technology with the accompanying increase in the education of the largest number of people, has not been seriously addressed, and therefore the current development of local development planning theory is overwhelmingly unsatisfactory. This is especially true of the lack of orderliness of the area of local development planning, as a basic factor in this, which hinders local development throughout the current world planning. It is for these reasons that the study of local planning systems in the world has been chosen as the subject of this paper, with the aim of contributing to the enrichment of that theory and raising the level of efficiency of that type of planning.

Copyright of Systems Engineering & Electronics is the property of Journal of Systems Engineering & Electronics Editorial Department and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This comprehensive review focuses on the Autonomous Driving System (ADS), which aims to reduce human errors that are the reason for about 95% of car accidents. The ADS consists of six stages: sensors, perception, localization, assessment, path planning, and control. We explain the main state-of-the-art techniques used in each stage, analyzing 275 papers, with 162 specifically on path planning due to its complexity, NP-hard optimization nature, and pivotal role in ADS. This paper categorizes path planning techniques into three primary groups: traditional (graph-based, sampling-based, gradient-based, optimization-based, interpolation curve algorithms), machine and deep learning, and meta-heuristic optimization, detailing their advantages and drawbacks. Findings show that meta-heuristic optimization methods, representing 23% of our study, are preferred for being general problem solvers capable of handling complex problems. In addition, they have faster convergence and reduced risk of local minima. Machine and deep learning techniques, accounting for 25%, are favored for their learning capabilities and fast responses to known scenarios. The trend towards hybrid algorithms (27%) combines various methods, merging each algorithm's benefits and overcoming the other's drawbacks. Moreover, adaptive parameter tuning is crucial to enhance efficiency, applicability, and balancing the search capability. This review sheds light on the future of path planning in autonomous driving systems, helping to tackle current challenges and unlock the full capabilities of autonomous vehicles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of tourism phobia and the problems of tourist coexistence are the subject matter, by means of a comparative analysis between the cities of Amsterdam, Barcelona and Berlin. The main objective of the study is to explain the tourism phobia phenomenon with the purpose of knowing the common characteristics that cause the appearance of problems of tourist coexistence. In order to be able to study this phenomenon, a statistical data search and informative articles analysis have been executed to point out the common characteristics and the problems of the tourist activity in this three cities. At the same time, interviews to personalities of the sector have been carried out, and include professionals from the public administration, associations, teachers and members of the private sector. This research has led us to consider that tourism phobia, etymologically speaking, gets away of the most common thoughts and opinions. All three cities present several problems of coexistence between tourists and residents which appear from the overcrowding of public spaces and as a result of a bad planning of the territory, causing discomfort among citizens. These problems have been understood as the hate to tourism by some industry players and the media.

Copyright of Economics & Environment / Ekonomia i Środowisko is the property of Fundacja Ekonomistow Srodowiska i Zasobow Naturalnych and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper presents a local planning approach that is targeted for pseudo-omnidirectional vehicles: that is, vehicles that can drive sideways and rotate on the spot. This local planner—MSDU–is based on optimal control and formulates a non-linear optimization problem formulation that exploits the omni-motion capabilities of the vehicle to drive the vehicle to the goal in a smooth and efficient manner while avoiding obstacles and singularities. MSDU is designed for a real platform for mobile manipulation where one key function is the capability to drive in narrow and confined areas. The real-world evaluations show that MSDU planned paths that were smoother and more accurate than a comparable local path planner Timed Elastic Band (TEB), with a mean (translational, angular) error for MSDU of (0.0028 m, 0.0010 rad) compared to (0.0033 m, 0.0038 rad) for TEB. MSDU also generated paths that were consistently shorter than TEB, with a mean (translational, angular) distance traveled of (0.6026 m, 1.6130 rad) for MSDU compared to (0.7346 m, 3.7598 rad) for TEB.

Copyright of Revista Kavilando is the property of Kavilando and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista Iberoamericana de Estudios de Desarrollo is the property of Revista Iberoamericana de Estudios de Desarrollo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Objectives　National policies to promote physical activity and exercise have been formulated by several ministries and agencies in Japan. This study aimed to examine the formulation and implementation of such policies in municipalities by administrative sector and population size.Methods　After stratifying all municipalities in Japan at the population level, we randomly selected 272 municipalities. We collected 1,632 cases in six sectors (health, sports, education, urban planning, transportation, and environment) within these municipalities.　A questionnaire survey on the status of policy formulation, implementation, and coordination among departments was conducted as a cross-sectional study. Differences between groups of municipalities were statistically analyzed using Fisher's exact test. The survey period was from September 2018 to March 2019.Results　A total of 616 responses were collected (response rate 37.7%). The response rates for health and education were lower than those for the other sectors. The rate of policy formulation to promote physical activity was extremely high in the health and sports sectors, and there was slight variation by population size. In contrast, formulation rates were generally low in the urban planning, transportation, and environment sectors, especially in smaller municipalities. In the sectors mentioned above, physical activity promotion projects mainly involved the development of exercise and sports infrastructures. Health, sports, and education were the primary sectors that used those environments. Regarding interdepartmental coordination in policy implementation, a cooperative relationship existed among the health, sports, and education sectors and between the urban planning and transportation sectors. However, smaller municipalities were found to have fewer opportunities for such collaboration and tended to implement policies independently.Conclusion　This study clarifies the policy formulation and implementation for promoting physical activity in municipalities at the national level in Japan. In addition, their characteristics were identified based on different administrative sectors and population size. These results are expected to be used in future local government policies.