Difficulties in identifying actual uses of land space from remote sensing-based land cover products often result in lost opportunities to enhance the capacity of applied research on human settlements. In an attempt to address these difficulties, this study investigates how land cover and land use are interrelated with each other and what determines the relationship patterns by analyzing detailed land use and land cover data for two large US metropolitan areas - the five-county Los Angeles and six-county Chicago regions - where a broad spectrum of human settlements, ranging from urban cores to less-urbanized edges, coexist. The analysis shows that the land cover-land use relationship substantially varies not only across regions but across neighborhoods within each region. Through multivariate regression, it is also found that the intraregional variation is highly associated with the neighborhood's stage of urbanization, median housing age, and other development characteristics, suggesting that the relationship pattern can largely be shaped by the history and evolution of urban design/development.

This article explores ways in which land use policy outcomes vary across contexts focusing, as an example, on urban growth boundaries. Specifically, it analyzes how various contextual factors interact with the policy and generate diverging development outcomes by employing a kernel-based regularized least squares method. Results show that the policy effectiveness is largely dependent on the region’s population size, initial density levels, and organizational conditions. The presence of urban growth boundaries also appears to shape the way other determinants influence development patterns, suggesting that the policy can both directly and indirectly promote a more compact/contiguous pattern of development.

Although urban growth boundaries (UGBs) are increasingly used as a containment policy to promote contiguous and compact urban forms, little is known about how UGBs affect development within the designated area or how development is displaced to other cities. This study analyzes the UGB's containment and spillover effects, focusing on the case of the Portland metropolitan area where UGBs have long been implemented. This is accomplished by employing a spatial market disequilibrium framework in which explicit consideration is given to the containment and spillover processes when under the influences of UGBs. The findings suggest that UGBs can promote development within the boundaries, but that cooperation with neighboring municipalities is necessary to effectively attain the policy goals. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

This study examines how land-use change simulation outcomes can vary based on the way the simulation model is applied, attempting to support informed model choices and model applications. This is accomplished through a series of experiments using a hypothetical model that represents the basic logic of various cell-based dynamic land-use change modeling environments. In the experiments, consideration is given to the sensitivity of the simulation results with respect to the following four application specifications: (1) the spatial resolution, (2) the temporal resolution, (3) the probability distribution, and (4) the degree of the influence of stochastic factors, under multiple growth scenarios. The experiments show that all four factors, particularly the spatiotemporal resolution and the degree to which stochastic factors are involved, can generate substantial variation in the simulation model outcomes. It is also found that the magnitude of the variation can be affected by changes in regional growth rates and the level of fluctuation, which determine the demand for new development to be allocated over the simulation time horizon. © 2013 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.

While urban poverty has been known to be spatially concentrated in inner-city areas for a long time, the degree of poverty concentration has declined substantially since the 1990s, whereas poverty has increasingly expanded to suburban areas to which relatively little attention has been paid. This study examines how poverty distribution has changed in the Los Angeles-Long Beach Combined Statistical Area and why. More specifically, an investigation is made to capture the detailed changes of poverty rates in over three thousand census tracts over the last two decades and to identify driving forces behind these spatiotemporal changes by employing spatial regression models. Results show that high poverty areas have stretched over space, not in a way that expands their overall size but in a way that increases the degree of spatial fragmentation throughout the last two decades. The results also reveal that neighborhood poverty change is largely shaped by wealth clustering and other spatially-explicit processes.

Cities worldwide are facing new challenges and opportunities with the proliferation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones. However, despite the increasing importance of managing drone activities at the local level, little is known about the extent to which cities adopt regulatory measures to deal with the challenges posed by this emerging technology and the factors that determine the local policy adopted. This study examines the dynamics of local drone policy adoption, focusing on California, which has the largest population of drones currently registered in the United States. A review of 482 California cities' municipal codes shows evolving patterns of policy adoption over the last two decades, with a rapid expansion since 2015. Multivariate survival analysis indicates that policy adoption at the local level is shaped by both municipal capacity and motivation factors, including the actions of neighboring cities. The analysis also finds evidence of disparities associated with socio-demographics, calling for more attention to the variation in local policy responsiveness to technology-driven challenges and ways to support local efforts and their collaboration.

Many of the biggest transportation challenges in Southern California arise not due to its overall density but due to the lack of concentration of densities. While recent years have witnessed increasing efforts to expand public transit services and encourage compact development in transit areas, there is a dearth of research providing support for improving the distribution of densities in the region. This project adopts a simultaneous equation modeling (SEM) approach to reveal the complexity of parcel-level (residential) land use intensification dynamics in a five-county Southern California metropolitan region with emphasis on the importance of reciprocal interactions between current and planned land use changes and the critical role of public transit accessibility. Results suggest that residential densification and upzoning processes reinforce each other. Urban residential upzoning can promote the probability of parcel-level residential densification significantly, even though it does not always lead to an immediate market response in every location. More importantly, the residential density increases are found to induce further plan/zoning modifications in nearby areas, indicating the presence of feedback loops in this dynamic relationship. There is also evidence of the positive influence of public transit accessibility. Single-family residential land parcels with greater access to high-quality transit services show a higher level of densification and upzoning probabilities, when all other conditions are held constant. Such positive effects are detected not only in existing high-quality transit areas but also in locations where public transit services will be available in the future.

As universities have become more integrated into their communities and regions, their host cities have become locations of choice for the highly educated facilitating increased innovation and productivity rates in several locales. Recent transitions toward knowledge-driven economies have also intensified growing geographic divides along the lines of education and raised concerns about the possibility of brain drain in a growing number of cities/regions. This study examines the changing geography of highly educated individuals (2000–2017) with a focus on small and medium-sized U.S. metropolitan areas with and without research universities. Results indicate the continuing trend of divergence among regions, but research universities are found to complement (the lack of) talent agglomeration and generate spatial spillovers beyond the county boundaries.