Optimizing Urban Planning to Address Homelessness Essay

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The question of optimizing urban planning is becoming more relevant every day due to the inability to solve some issues entirely through the tools currently used by the authorities. In particular, there appeared an urge to elaborate new ways of dealing with questions of homelessness. Implementing sensitivity analysis introducing quantitative models and methods that organizations and systems can use to measure multiple aspects of performance may become a choice to elevate the level of urban planning.

Sensitivity Analysis

Researchers use sensitivity analysis to assess the contribution of single preference parameters to the uncertainty of the ranking of alternatives. That is sensitivity analysis answers the question of how changes in independent variables influence a dependent outcome. The most obvious application of this kind of analysis is in finance, stock market trading, and sales. There are also ways of using sensitivity analysis in other fields, for instance, Scholten, Schuwirth, Reichert, and Lienert (2015) in their study use global sensitivity analysis (GSA) to address the question of water supply infrastructure planning. GSA allowed the researchers to assess the contribution of individual parameters and parameter groups on the uncertainty of the ranking of alternatives (Scholten et al., 2015). Their study elaborated valuable advice for urban planners to improve the situation concerning water supply infrastructure planning in Switzerland. In short, sensitivity analysis is an important up-to-date tool to tackle questions in a variety of fields.

Urban Planning and Homelessness

Sensitivity analysis can be used to address the issues with homelessness as an innovative way of treating the matter. It is common knowledge that there are two main reasons for homelessness: unemployment and high residential space cost. Therefore, there seem to be three ways of addressing the question of homelessness: creating jobs, decreasing accommodation cost, and creating shelters for the homeless. All three questions touch upon urban planning in some manner.

Nagarajan (2014) in his doctorate dissertation addresses the question of creating shelters for the evacuees during natural disasters. In his study, Nagarajan (2014) used the database of all the available evacuation shelters and tested them for suitability. In the same manner, authorities can create a database consisting of all the shelters for the homeless and apply sensitivity analysis to improve the shelters’ accessibility. If new shelters appear out of this analysis, authorities can use them as shelters for evacuees during natural disasters (Nagarajan, 2014).

Moreover, sensitivity analysis can be used to find ways of decreasing residential space cost and creating more jobs. Johnson (2015) in his study states that the growth of mobile technologies and geographic information systems (GIS) enables today’s authorities to implement decision theory and sensitivity analysis for the social needs of large and small communities. The high cost of analyzing massive amounts of GIS data, though, makes it problematic for underfinanced budget organizations to perform such research on a regular basis (Johnson, 2015). In short, the issue of homelessness may and should be addressed through urban planning utilizing sensitivity analysis.

Conclusion

The issues with homelessness are not easy to approach through conventional ways especially following the overall trend of rationalizing social institution maintenance costs. The studies examined in the paper show that there are several ways of applying modern technology to make urban planning more orientated towards addressing the question of homelessness. In conclusion, despite the high-cost sensitive analysis in association with GIS data, it is vital for the authorities to use up-to-date methods to improve the situation with homeless people.

References

Johnson, M. P. (2015). Data, analytics and community-based organizations: Transforming data to decisions for community development. ISJLP, 11(49). Web.

Nagarajan, M. (2014). An operational research-based integrated approach for mass evacuation planning of a city. Web.

Scholten, L., Schuwirth, N., Reichert, P., & Lienert, J. (2015). Tackling uncertainty in multi-criteria decision analysis–An application to water supply infrastructure planning. European Journal of Operational Research, 242(1), 243-260.

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IvyPanda. "Optimizing Urban Planning to Address Homelessness." January 20, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/optimizing-urban-planning-to-address-homelessness/.

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