Relational Structure Analysis of City Planning Issues by Fuzzy Structural Modeling

Abstract: The first step in drafting policies for city building and town planning is to find what kinds of issues have proved to be controversial. Complexity within city planning for many unresolved, modern problems makes the issues more complicated than before. City planning issues have formed a complex, which is never resolved by conventional methods including interview surveying and questionnaires. This study is aimed at developing a new method to grasp systematically issues essential to city planning and their position in the whole planning scheme. Because the present paper sees the complexity of city planning coming from the intricate relation between relevant issues, the final goal is finding out the relational structure of planning issues. First this paper deals with a desirable process for resolving a complex loaded with many planning issues by developing an appropriate way to collect as many issues as possible concerned directly and indirectly with elements of city planning, and to establish a hierarchy of these issues. Secondly Fuzzy Structural Modeling is applied to the hierarchy in order to discuss the attitude and awareness of people working professionally in the field of city planning, toward planning issues. Finally the complex is resolved into the relational structure of planning issues through comparison and integration of attitudes toward the issues with the assistance of an association analysis.