Interactive spatial urban planning - Essay Example

The urban population health is affected by interplay of multiple environmental factors such as air pollution, noise pollution, traffic and external safety (Galea & Vlahov, 2005). The traditional urban planning has increasingly been termed as an inefficient tool, due to its inability to take all these multiple environmental factors into consideration, when planning for urban developments. Consequently, Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSSs) for interactive spatial urban planning have become an important tool for the modern urban development planning (Sugumaran & Degroote, 2010).

This is due to their ability to use high-tech computers that are linked to databases to simulate interactive models that create interplay of the multiple environmental factors that are of concern to the urban planning (TNO, n.d.). The overall effect is that with this type of technology, it is becoming increasingly easier to understand the problem of spatial planning for urban developments, long way before the actual planning and designing is done (Pearce, Richardson, Mitchell & Shortt, 2010).

This is advantageous, sine it allows for understanding the likely problems and addressing them during the planning and designing stages, as opposed to controlling the problems later, when the urban developments have already been designed and constructed. This does not only help to solve the issues of human and environmental health associated with urban spatial planning, but also in the development of cities and urban regions that will not require to be redesigned in the future( Galea, Freudenberg & Vlahov, 2005).

Therefore, the modern architectural design is not only affected by the issue of generating appropriate designs for cities and urban regions, but also ensuring that the health concerns are equally addressed (Pearce, Richardson, Mitchell & Shortt, 2010). A Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSSs) as an urban planning tool can be