Community and Regional Planning

Searching for geo-information and inquiring about the conditions of exchange involves transaction costs. Neoclassical economy neglects the existence of these costs and therefore lacks economic models which could be applied to geoinformation. We are interested in establishing theoretical foundations of transaction costs related to geo-information and in methods which could help to quantify these costs. The importance of this article is that this is to date the first attempt to measure the transaction cost of geo-information and at the same time it presents the first quantitative results. The research is novel and therefore in development. The presented methodology reflects our experiences gained in the selected cities of Berlin, Vienna and Zurich. We conclude the article with open questions and further research directions.

In this article we focus on online games and serious games in urban planning. At the beginning we provide some definitions of games and serious games and discuss the potential of serious games. We overview the urban planning games available online and give some examples of the game stories and concepts. The main goal of the article is to explore the potential of serious games in public participatory planning. To this end, a group of students at HafenCity University Hamburg designed and implemented a serious game. The game was entitled B3 Game and applied on the case of a market place in Billstedt, one of the city districts in Hamburg. The game enables the players to design their marketplace and discuss their suggestions with other citizens and urban planners. It aims at supporting playful public participation in urban planning. We conclude the paper with a discussion and further research directions.

In this paper we concentrate on the geoinformation collected with the help of an online map-based public participatory platform. The platform was implemented within the EU project SWITCH. It represents a novel approach in combining online questionnaires and interactive online maps. The developed map-based public participatory platform was implemented for the case study of Wilhelmsburg, which is a city district in Hamburg, Germany. In our research we focused on the technical architecture of the platform and the issues of geoinformation quality collected with the help of online map-based questionnaires. Different measures of geoinformation quality related to our case study are presented and discussed. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the results and further research directions.

This paper outlines the development of public participation 2.0 user types based on the existing Web 2.0 user types. The theoretical concepts were tested on nexthamburg.de, a public participatory platform enabling the users to exchange the ideas about the future of the city Hamburg. Existing Web 2.0 user typologies classify users according to their activity and according to their communication with Web 2.0. We adapt these user types for the needs of public participation and test them on our study case with nexthamburg.de. We classified users according to their interaction into passive, active and reactive users. The underlying functions of the website, on which the study is based, are the posting of ideas, commenting on ideas and voting for ideas. This article presents the results of the first study phase, based on the quantitative data gathered with the help of eTracker and the website's database. eTracker is a software that tracks the behaviour of the users and their interaction with the platform. We aim at getting on overview of how people interact with a public participation platform and to classify the interaction forms and the user types in order to better understand the possible uses of public participatory platforms.

Agriculture in the Texas High Plains depends entirely on the Ogallala Aquifer. Texas enacted water conservation legislation to address declining reserves in the aquifer. We developed an integrated regional water policy model that links a hydrology model with an economic optimization model to estimate policy impacts with respect to economic cost and water conservation. Testing the effectiveness of two policies, a groundwater extraction tax and extraction quotas, we observe that neither significantly inhibits groundwater use. Although both policies conserve similar amounts of groundwater, the regional cost of the tax policy to agriculture is more than the quota policy.

An increasing refugee population has led to scrutiny of the effects of refugees in the United States. One way to assess effects is through studying economic and fiscal impacts. We used an input–output framework and refugee employment and wage data to estimate the short-term economic and fiscal impacts, both indirect and induced effects, of refugees living in central Iowa. Findings suggest that the employment and income multiplier effects are significant, although short-term fiscal impacts are negative. The study provides an objective assessment of an important and understudied group in central Iowa and could have relevance nationwide, including for Extension practitioners in developing or strengthening programming or contributing to policy formulation. Introduction Since 1975, over 3.3 million refugees from different parts of the world have come into the United States and resettled across all 50 states (Refugee Processing Center, n.d.). As opposed to an immigrant, who consciously de...

Statistically predicted future tourism demand is used to conduct an economic impact analysis in twelve tourism zones in the state of Arkansas. The analysis reveals spatial variability in employment, and output growth that will continue into the future. Tourism has the potential as an economic growth engine for the state, especially in economically disadvantaged regions with long-term benefits.

This study utilizes survey data analyzed at the regional level to obtain additional insights which may be left unnoticed if the analysis only considers data at the state level. The current analysis reveals that farm operators' and/or landowners' decision to participate in the agritourism industry in Arkansas is affected by state government infrastructure. But these infrastructures are varied among regions. The infrastructures are state government support in training the farm operators; in promotion and marketing as well as certainty and transparency in laws and regulations. State government's sponsored trainings in agritourism along with marketing and promotion are viewed as the most important factors in all studied regions that affect operators' decision to participate in the program. This finding suggests that state agricultural extension agencies can play an important role in the future to ensure the success of the newly developed agritourism industry in Arkansas.

This study estimates the economic impacts of a hypothetical retiree in-migration scena-rio involving elderly households and examines the effect of aggregation of study regions in an input-output framework on their regional purchase coefficients, and multipliers. Using migra-tion estimates to three Arkansas counties based on income types, it was observed that the more affluent retirees tend to relocate to counties with more amenities and a higher standard of living. Findings suggest that the economically large counties with diversified industry have greater economic impacts not just as a result of higher retiree spending owing to in-migration of high-income retirees, but also due to more opportunities to purchase goods and services from local establishments, leading to higher output, employment and value-added multip-liers. Further, it was observed that the aggregation of study regions in an input-output framework results in significant variation in economic impact results compared t...

An economic impact analysis was conducted in two rural counties in Northwest Arkansas to observe effects of hypothetical retiree in-migration as a sustainable economic development policy. The analysis reveals economic benefits with varying impacts and additional socio-economic costs on both counties. The policy has the potential for sustaining in the long-term.

A shift-share analysis was conducted for the 75 counties of Arkansas to determine the changing structure of the states' economy for the period 1980-2000. The analysis reveals a lack of overall comparative advantage in the majority of rural counties due to their inability to obtain higher paying jobs in manufacturing and professional sectors.

The state of Arkansas enjoys the advantages of its unique central location in the nation, excellent natural surroundings, low cost of living, and one of the best business climates in the southern United States. It is home to several of the largest corporations in the world. Over the period 1980-2000, there was tremendous growth in the state’s economy. However, the growth was confined to specific regions that led to several socio-economic issues adversely affecting the state. To better understand the components and variations in economic growth, a county-wise shift-share analysis was conducted. Employment, a good indicator of economic growth, was used to analyze the changes in the local economic structure of the 75 counties in the state. Findings suggest that while services and retail trade continue to grow, manufacturing and the state/local government continue to be important employers for the state. Farm employment continues to decline, although farm-related manufacturing and servi...