The Real and Virtual Worlds of Spatial Planning

The Real and Virtual Worlds of Spatial Planning brings together contributions from leaders in landscape, transportation, and urban planning today. The authors present an international range of case studies - from Europe, Australia, North America, Asia and Africa - that ground the exploration of ideas in the realities of sustainable urban and regional planning, landscape planning and present the prospects for using virtual worlds for modeling spatial environments and their application in planning. The first part of this volume explores the challenges for planning in the real world that are caused by the dynamics of socio-spatial systems as well as by the contradictions of their evolutionary trends related to their spatial layout. Case studies from developed as well as developing countries are presented. The second part presents diverse concepts to model, analyze, visualize, monitor and control socio-spatial systems by using virtual worlds. Theoretical topics include modeling spatial systems as Petri nets, cellular automata as well as dynamical systems.