Research - Research Projects

Land Use and Environment

Under the leadership of Gerrit Knaap, in collaboration with Research Associates Yan Song and Jungul Sohn, many of the Center’s initial projects focused on land use and environmental issues. Much of the work involves the use of advanced geographic information systems, the measurement of urban form and development capacity, and the use of such data for policy analysis and land use decision making.

Smart Growth and Climate Change

Summary of the Project:
This project begins to bring together two strands of applied research that, to date, have been carried out separately under the headings of “Smart Growth?and “adaptation to climate change.? Both entail similar concerns, draw on complementary modeling tools, and are concerned with bridging the gaps that may exist among science and engineering, stakeholder interests, and policy implementation.

Entitled “Regional Development, Infrastructure and Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change", the project is being conducted by Matthias Ruth, Director of the Environmental Policy Program in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Ruth is also the Roy F. Weston Chair in Natural Economics and Co-Director of Engineering and Public Policy. To access the project’s website, click here

It is the purpose of their site to compile relevant sources on each of the two research areas and their interface. A synthesis and case studies are forthcoming in Regional Development, Infrastructure, and Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change, edited by Matthias Ruth and intended to bridge the gap between the two research fields, create synergies, reconcile differences, and provide insights for decision makers at national and local scales.

The National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education provided a grant that funded research into the interface of Smart Growth and climate change, which has clear links (and extends) the project described above. This work created a systematic assessment and compilation of the literature that lies at the interface, which can be found by clicking here

This second web site periodically updates that literature. The most important product from the grant will be a book of case studies on this interface of the two research areas, due to be published some time next year.

National Land Market Monitoring Demonstration Project

Summary of the Project:
As an extension of work begun by Dr. Knaap at the University of Illinois, the Center is about to begin the second phase of a national demonstration project in land market monitoring. In Phase I, funded by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Dr. Knaap and Dr. Zorica Budic (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) conducted a national assessment of the capacity of metropolitan planning organizations to use GIS for land use and transportation planning. The final report was recently submitted to the sponsoring agencies. Also in Phase I, the Center organized workshops in Orlando, Baltimore, College Park, and San Diego in part to identify candidate sites for Phase II of the project.

A proposal for Phase II is now under consideration by HUD, the Lincoln Institute, the National Association of Home Builders, the National Association of Realtors, the Fannie Mae Foundation, and the National Center for Housing and the Environment. Under Phase II, the Center will provide matching funds to four or five regional organizations (e.g., metropolitan planning agencies, councils of government, or county governments) to develop and implement land market monitoring programs.

Training on how to develop, implement, and utilize a monitoring system will be provided by the Center and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The Center will also serve as a technical assistance center, collecting data from the participating metropolitan areas, and serving the data via the world wide web.

Measuring Urban Form

Summary of the Project:
As a continuation of work they began at the University of Illinois, Gerrit Knaap and Yan Song are developing quantitative measures of urban form and using these measures to conduct policy analysis. Early work, using data from Portland, Oregon, has produced publications in the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Urban Economics, the International Regional Science Review, and the Journal of the Transportation Research Board.

In 2001, the Center received funding from the Lincoln Institute and the Brookings Institution to conduct a detailed analysis of urban development patterns for five metropolitan areas. These include Portland, Oregon; Orlando, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota. Focusing on the area urbanized over the last two decades in each metropolitan area, the Center will calculate several measures of urban form and conduct inter- and intrametropolitan analyses of differences and trends in urban form. Preliminary results were recently presented at the meetings of the Regional Science Association in Philadelphia.

Web-based Technology in Urban Planning

Summary of the Project:
Dr. Knaap, working with Lewis Hopkins at the University of Illinois, is investigating ways in which information technologies are changing how local governments plan and manage growth. The purpose of the research is to advance the state of the art in the use of web-based technology for using, managing, and making plans.

Work at the Center includes a web-based survey of local government websites that focus on planning. The results of the survey were recently published by the American Planning Association as a Planning Advisory Service Memo and used in two workshops organized by Dr. Knaap and Dr. Hopkins at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, which funded the work.