Computer-aided regional planning

Abstract

The ISP computer system for interactive spatial planning was originally developed as a part of a project concerning land-use planning in the Malmö region of Sweden. In its first versions it was set up for use on mainframe computers. Land-use models were developed using this version of the computer system for Stockholm and Perth. During the last few years the system has been redesigned for a Sun workstation environment. The background for this redevelopment has been the use of the system for the preparation of a land-use plan for the metropolitan region of Helsinki. The philosophy of the ISP system is to develop an interactive work environment for the generation and evaluation of land-use plan alternatives. The focus is on man-machine interaction and flexibility of model development. The current paper outlines the properties of the current version of the ISP system and the traits of the models designed for Perth and Helsinki planners. The paper uses the Perth application to demonstrate the modelling capabilities within the system. The Helsinki application is used as a means to illustrate some traits of the graphics interface.