ecological destruction in human-dominated landscapes has significant impacts on environment sustainability internationally. landscape planning can play a role in mitigating the effects of human-related activities. one element of landscape planning involves the analysis of the biological, spatial and social arrangement of areas in an urban environment and identifying characteristics that are und...

This paper describes a methodology for automatic classification of places according to the North American Industry Classification System. This taxonomy is applied in many areas, particularly in Urban Planning. The typical approach is to manually classify places/Points-of-Interest that are collected with field surveys. Given the financial costs of the task some semi-automatic approaches have bee...

It is claimed that a new style of urban planning and policy intertwined with ICT is emerging and urban planning and ICT policy are no longer considered as separate disciplines. The interactions between electronic spaces and urban spaces are so complex and uncertain that confront urban planners and policy makers with great challenges. However, the assumption about the relationship between ICT an...

We present ZoneRec—a zone recommendation system for physical businesses in an urban city, which uses both public business data from Facebook and urban planning data. The system consists of machine learning algorithms that take in a business’ metadata and outputs a list of recommended zones to establish the business in. We evaluate our system using data of food businesses in Singapore and assess...

In complex systems, flexibility and adaptability to changes are crucial to the systems’ dynamic stability and evolution. Such resilience requires that the system is able to respond to disturbances by self-organizing, which implies a certain level of entropy within the system. Dynamic states (static, cyclical/periodic, complex, and chaotic) reflect this generative capacity, and correlate with th...

It is the living conditions in the cities that determine the future of our livelihood. “To change life, we must first change space”Henri Lefebvre. Sustainable development is a utopian aspiration for South African cities (especially the case study of the Gauteng City Region), which are currently characterized by unplanned growth and increasing urban sprawl. While the reasons for poor environment...