100 Essential Books of Planning

Since this is my 100th attempt at a coherent post, I thought it would be a good idea to reflect upon something numerically appropriate.

In 2009, to celebrate 100 years of the American planning movement, the American Planning Association decided to put together a list of 'essential books of planning' - which of course contains 100 books. All good planners own well thumbed copies of all 100 and most have committed them to memory. Perhaps not. Actually, there are many people may have forgotten about/never heard of. The quick, at-a-glance pdf list is worth downloading just to check this.

The list is compiled by decade, and it makes interesting reading. Some examples below (can't say I've read them all but I did particularly like Leopold's A Sand County Almanac)...

• Bowling Alone (Putnam, 2000)
• The Rise of the Creative Class (Florida, 2002)
• The Devil in the White City (Larson, 2004)
• The Geography of Nowhere (Kunstler, 1994)
• Edge City (Garreau, 1991)
• Cities of Tomorrow (Hall, 1988)
• Life Between Buildings (Gehl, 1987)
• The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (Whyte, 1980)
• A Reader in Planning Theory (Faludi, 1973)
• Small is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1973)
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961)
• The Image of the City (Lynch, 1960)
• Towards New Towns for America (Stein, 1951)
• A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Leopold, 1949)
• The Structure and Growth of Residential Neighborhoods in American Cities (Hoyt, 1939)
• Towards a New Architecture (Le Corbusier, 1923; in English, 1927)
• Cities in Evolution (Geddes, 1915)

...if you're wondering why Garden Cities of To-Morrow is not on the list, check your dates. Obviously, the list is US-centric but it does make interesting reading. There are even some 'methods' books on the list, such as Krueckeberg and Silvers' 1974 text on Urban Planning Analysis. Also, there are many on the list that are not really 'planning' books as such, like von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944).

Filtering Flow Data

My adventures in spatial interaction visualisation continue. I'm currently finalising some more of this work in a paper I'm writing and it gets quite complicated so I've tried to think of ways to simplify the patterns within the vast datasets I've been working with.

The image below shows inter-district migration in the UK for 2001 at different flow magnitudes in a very short animation. This is just one example of the kind of visual things I've been working on recently.

Flow Map Layout

I've been experimenting with mapping flow data (again) and this time have been looking at Flow Map Layout, by Phan et al. at Stanford. There is a short paper on it, and a slideshare presentation, but basically it offers a slightly different approach to flow mapping.

I experimented using UK commuting data for 2001. I looked at the top 50 flows (by district) into Greater London. This equates to more than 550,000 commuters going in to London but it excludes intra-London moves obviously. It's a bit tricky at first when you are trying to get used to it but when you do you can produce some nice images... Click on the image below to see it full size.

You can move things around in the (basic) mapping interface and it is actually quite flexible. There are some display options for colours and edge routing, etc.

The largest inflow was from Epping Forest, with around 26,000 commuters.

Local Enterprise Partnerships in England

Some recent news from England, where the Government has announced that 56 proposals for Local Enterprise Partnerships have been received. Although they are not similar in scale to the previous regional structures, there is evidence that they have some functional basis.

Among the proposals are Liverpool City Region, Kent and Medway, 'Enterprise M3' (covering parts of Hampshire and Surrey), 'Gatwick Diamond' and Sheffield City Region. All this came about because of a letter Vince Cable and Eric Pickles sent to Local Authority and Business Leaders in June 2010.

Interesting snippets from the letter include 'separate arrangements will apply in London' and 'the Coalition Government is determined to rebalance the economy towards the private sector' and - interestingly - 'we wish to enable partnerships to better reflect the natural economic geography of the areas they serve and hence to cover real functional economic and travel to work areas'.

Given this last statement, the list of the proposals submitted begins to look more interesting...

Economic Deprivation in London

I've recently been doing some analysis of the Economic Deprivation Index for England, focusing on a number of different cities. This is part of some research I'm doing into concentrated disadvantage more generally so I thought I'd just post a map showing the data for London in 2005.

The map below shows data for the EDI in London in 2005. It's pretty similar to what you'd expect but it does make interesting viewing... If you click the image it will open up full size in your web browser.


That's all for now, but I plan to post more like this in future.

Save as DBF in Excel 2007

One common problem for ArcGIS users over the past few years has been the decision of Microsoft not to allow users the option of saving files in dbf format from Excel 2007. It's not a problem if you are still using Excel 2003 but if you only have Excel 2007 it makes what was previously quite simple a lot more difficult.


One tool I've recently used is an Excel Add-In produced by Gyula Gulyas from theXLwiz blog. There are some useful dbf videos on his youtube channel which is, possibly, the only one in the world to combine videos about dbase file formats and videos of cheerleading!

Anyway, I have the tool. It cost me £17.34 ($25 USD) but it has been worth every penny. I know there are other options and I've tried some of them, but the Gulyas tool is so simple and effective and results in very compact file sizes. I highly recommend it!

A Nearest Neighbour Index of Multiple Deprivation

I've blogged before about my attempts to add a more spatial dimension to the existing Indices of Deprivation for England. In this post, I have decided to share the data for my calculations on a Nearest Neighbour Index of Multiple Deprivation, following the method described in this paper.

The image below shows the IMD2007 (left) and NNIMD2007 (right) for Birmngham, with red most deprived and blue least deprived.

I have put together a spreadsheet containing the original IMD data plus my NNIMD data for all 32,482 LSOAs in England. If you click on the links below you can access the data - you'll need to click the 'download' link to get the data.

NNIMD dataset - Excel 2003 version (.xls)

NNIMD dataset - Excel 2007 version (.xlsx)