Testing a gravity-based accessibility instrument to engage stakeholders into integrated LUT planning

The paper starts from the concern that while there is a large body of literature focusing on the theoretical definitions and measurements of accessibility, the extent to which such measures are used in planning practice is less clear. Previous reviews of accessibility instruments have in fact identified a gap between the clear theoretical assumptions and the infrequent applications of accessibility instruments in spatial and transport planning. In this paper we present the results of a structured-workshop involving private and public stakeholders to test usability of gravity-based accessibility measures (GraBaM) to assess integrated land-use and transport policies. The research is part of the COST Action TU1002 “Accessibility Instruments for Planning Practice” during which different accessibility instruments where tested for different case studies. Here we report on the empirical case study of Rome.

Storytelling and story testing in domestication

The domestication of plants and animals marks one of the most significant transitions in human, and indeed global, history. Traditionally, study of the domestication process was the exclusive domain of archaeologists and agricultural scientists; today it is an increasingly multidisciplinary enterprise that has come to involve the skills of evolutionary biologists and geneticists. Although the application of new information sources and methodologies has dramatically transformed our ability to study and understand domestication, it has also generated increasingly large and complex datasets, the interpretation of which is not straightforward. In particular, challenges of equifinality, evolutionary variance, and emergence of unexpected or counter-intuitive patterns all face researchers attempting to infer past processes directly from patterns in data. We argue that explicit modeling approaches, drawing upon emerging methodologies in statistics and population genetics, provide a powerful means of addressing these limitations. Modeling also offers an approach to analyzing datasets that avoids conclusions steered by implicit biases, and makes possible the formal integration of different data types. Here we outline some of the modeling approaches most relevant to current problems in domestication research, and demonstrate the ways in which simulation modeling is beginning to reshape our understanding of the domestication process.