NCJ Number
170591
Journal
Substance Use and Misuse Volume: 33 Issue: 3 Dated: (1998) Pages: 793-817
Date Published
1998
Length
25 pages
Annotation
The concept of a sustainable city and its theoretical implications for the urban system in Italy were studied by means of the Neural Network model.
Abstract
Urban sustainability was considered to be based on positive interactions among the social, economic, and physical subsystems and to consist of a situation in which social well-being coexisted with economic development and environmental quality. The research used data regarding the standard of living, business activity, unemployment, services, crime, the population, and use of leisure time. The database consisted of 43 characteristics of 95 cities. The data were processed by Self-Reflexive Neural Networks (SRNN), a useful instrument for investigating and conducting analogic questioning of the database. The analysis revealed that after the SRNN learned the structure of the weights from the database by means of querying the network with the most or least of specific groups of attributes, it was possible to note the related properties and to rank the cities with respects to their overall profile. Tables, figure, author biographies and photographs, and 19 references (Author abstract modified)