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Urban Planning

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Urban, city, and town planning seek to inform land use, development, and transportation infrastructure to accommodate the needs of the community, often with the explicit goal of maximizing both economic vitality and overall quality of life. RAND helps to inform policymakers who plan long-term urban services and neighborhood design, from determining the public health implications of proximity to parklands or inner city waste abatement to the role of urban planning in nation-building efforts.

Commentary

How Can Commercial Buildings Become Needed Housing?

Jun 6, 2022

Adaptive reuse has tremendous promise for making a dent in Southern California's housing shortage, but realizing its full potential will require thoughtful and timely policymaking.
Essay

Environmental Racism: How Historic Redlining Continues to Affect Communities

Jun 27, 2022

Starting in the 1930s, neighborhoods across America were redlined—marked on government maps as too hazardous, as in, too Black or too immigrant, for federal home loans. When zoning officials needed somewhere to put a new factory or freeway, those redlined neighborhoods were like a bullseye that they hit again and again.

Explore Urban Planning

Dissertation

Responding to Urban Innovation: The Case of E-Scooters in Los Angeles County

Builds upon existing frameworks for how policymakers respond to innovations by considering the arrival and subsequent policy response to a recent iteration of the platform economy, shared electric scooters

May 18, 2022
Commentary

California Needs 1.2 Million New Homes. How Will It Get There?

Voluntary incentives foster increased production of affordable housing, while mandates alone increase the cost of producing housing, dampening both market-rate and affordable housing production. It is well past time to acknowledge the evidence and focus on the adoption of voluntary programs that incentivize the rapid creation of dense, infill housing available at both affordable and market rents.

May 13, 2022
Report

Could Adaptive Reuse of Commercial Buildings Address L.A.'s Housing Crisis?

Repurposing underutilized commercial properties could provide 9 to 14 percent of the total housing Los Angeles County needs to produce over the next eight years. Conversion of hotels/motels is feasible, but reuse of office buildings depends on area-specific real estate prices and the size of new units.

Apr 6, 2022
News Release

Repurposing Commercial Buildings Could Help L.A. Meet Housing Needs, but Financial, Regulatory Barriers Exist

Repurposing underutilized commercial properties such as hotel/motels and vacant office buildings could provide about 9% to 14% of the housing Los Angeles County needs to produce over the next eight years.

Apr 6, 2022
Tool

Environmental Racism: A Tool for Exploring the Enduring Legacy of Redlining on Urban Environments

Researchers developed an online tool for visualizing the spatial relationships between the discriminatory practice of redlining and exposure to environmental hazards (e.g., pollution, waste sites).

Mar 31, 2022
Project

Environmental Racism

Past housing policies—such as redlining—have an enduring legacy on urban neighborhoods today, and have contributed to which communities enjoy more trees, less traffic, and better air quality, and which face hazards such as pollution, toxic waste sites, and flooding risk.

Mar 31, 2022
Journal Article

A Multicity Analysis of Daytime Surface Urban Heat Islands in India and the US

Satellite data and various spectral indices are used to predict surface heat. Built-up indices used in the U.S. do not differentiate sparse vegetation and built-up surfaces, and thus fail in India.

Feb 25, 2022
Commentary

Climate Change Is Only One Driver of Explosive Wildfire Season—Don't Forget Land Management

The fire seasons that have been scorching huge areas and wiping entire towns from the map appear to be the future. Accepting that wildland fires are a part of our environment and working to live with fires rather than continuously fighting against them may be the most responsible path forward.

Aug 16, 2021
Report

Adapting to Adversity amid a Global Pandemic: Stakeholder Insights About Progress and Next Steps for Taking Integrative Action to Build Resilient Systems

In 2020, the global pandemic and ongoing chronic stressors caused multiple shocks in the United States. The authors describe recommendations to advance an integrative resilience research and practice agenda based on recent stakeholder experiences.

Jun 11, 2021
Journal Article

Infrastructure Resilience to Navigate Increasingly Uncertain and Complex Conditions in the Anthropocene

Resilience theory can help infrastructure managers navigate increasing complexity of the systems and environments in which they operate.

Mar 4, 2021
Journal Article

Modeling the Uncertainty of Potential Impacts on Robust Stormwater Management from Neighborhood-Scale Impervious Cover Change: A Case Study of Population-Based Scenarios in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

This work presents a method for applying high-spatial resolution population-based scenarios to pre-existing stormwater models. We explore the impact of two long-term population growth scenarios for the Pittsburgh region.

Feb 4, 2021
Journal Article

Addressing Impact Evaluation Gaps in Belt and Road Initiative Projects in Africa: The Standard Gauge Railway Project in Kenya as a Proof of Concept

Proposing new directions for evaluation framework development targeting the Belt and Road Initiative projects, using the Standard Gauge Railway project in Kenya as a proof of concept of our proposed evaluation framework.

Oct 7, 2020
Journal Article

Emerging Infectious Disease, the Household Built Environment Characteristics, and Urban Planning: Evidence on Avian Influenza in Vietnam

This study examines the relationship between the mix of household-scale water supplies, sanitation systems, and construction materials, and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza among poultry in Vietnam.

Sep 16, 2020
Journal Article

Disaster Risk Reduction in Cities: Towards a New Normal

This chapter introduces some of the key issues facing scholars and practitioners of disaster risk reduction in urban areas, which are now home to over half of the global population.

Sep 3, 2020
Journal Article

A Complexity Approach for Reducing Disaster Risks for Marginalized Urban Populations: Comparing DRR Interventions Across Four Cities

This chapter conceptualizes cities and their risks as a complex adaptive system and examines the methods for risk reduction.

Sep 3, 2020
Journal Article

Applying the Knowledge Product Evaluation (KnoPE) Framework to Two Urban Resilience Cases in the United States

This paper describes the development and testing of the Knowledge Product Evaluation (KnoPE) framework,which represents a structured approach to evaluating the utility of decision-support tools for urban resilience.

Feb 27, 2020
Commentary

Green Infrastructure in Los Angeles: An Olympian Feat

Los Angeles has an opportunity to reinvent itself by harnessing the collective spirit of Olympics development, climate activism, and Measure W funding. No single project can address all LA's environmental needs, but many diverse projects could provide an opportunity for synergies and to create a new “city feel,” the way palm trees, traffic, and movie-touting billboards do now.

Feb 11, 2020
Report

Implementing a New Mobility Vision for Rancho Higuera in a Deeply Uncertain, Fast-Changing World: Results from RAND Corporation Participatory Local Planning Workshops

Culver City seeks to reimagine mobility, shifting from cars to other transit modes. A RAND team helped the city develop an implementation plan using decision making under deep uncertainty (DMDU) methods embedded in a participatory "shadow" process.

Jan 3, 2020

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RAND Topic:
Urban Planning

Topic Synonyms:
City Planning

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