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23
Interactive Localisation System
for Urban Planning Issues
Roberto De Lotto
University of Pavia
Italy
1. Introduction
The paper discusses the benefits of specific user's oriented tools in urban planning
processes, throughout the applications of an original system devised to define the
localisation of urban services based on traffic distribution. Operative examples concern the
Italian city of Pavia.
The system ULISSE (Urban Location Interactive System for SErvices), created by the author,
uses a static model of network optimization which minimizes the global access cost (in term
of time) faced by clients of a predefined service location. With a client-server structure and a
friendly user interface, ULISSE provides in one single process all the classical results such as
minimum paths research, definition of services influence area and access time to reach each
service.
ULISSE is useful for planners to test traffic and environmental effects of localisation
hypotheses, or to find the best localisation solution for specific urban functions in terms of
accessibility. The paper shows examples of related applications on the city of Pavia: check of
traffic pressure on environment; examination of efficiency of a new public mobility service
(bus); best localisation of emergency services.
After a brief presentation of the cultural background about localisation models and urban
planning, author describes: the analogical network, the calculation model, the system
ULISSE and its applications.
2. Background
When approaching to regional and urban planning it is necessary to control a wide group of
issues, themes, techniques and models. After the unpredictable transformations that the
industrial revolution caused to the cities, modern urban planning was born as a new
discipline that took its basis from architecture, engineering, hygiene, social science,
aesthetics (Gabellini, 2001).
As any design process, urban planning is an extremely involved activity characterized by an
iterative operative procedure strongly related to the designer's experience and know-how.
For this reason, it cannot be described as a fixed series of phases, since even at intermediate
steps, some corrections or modifications of the initial stage could become mandatory.
Moreover, in the last decades, planning activity is oriented to divide the structural/strategic
phase from the operative one (Mazza, 1997). With reference to the first phase, to define a
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