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The spatial configuration of cities and its relationship to the urban environment has recently been the subject of empirical, theoretical and policy research. Because of the disciplines involved, relevant articles are scattered over a large number of journals. The objective of this paper is to put the issues in perspective by reviewing the basic concepts and relationships involved, and to evaluate critically the current state of knowledge about urban form, energy utilisation and the environment. The scope of the paper is limited to urban transport energy use and the associated emissions. Suggestions for further progress in the field are offered, with emphasis placed on integrated urban models as useful and policy-sensitive analytical tools.

This paper presents a data collection effort designed to incorporate the social dimension in social activity-travel behavior by explicitly studying the link between individuals' social activities and their social networks. The main hypothesis of the data collection effort is that individuals' travel behavior is conditional upon their social networks; that is, a key cause of travel behavior is the social dimension represented by social networks. With this hypothesis in mind, and using survey and interview instruments, the respondents' social networks are collected using an egocentric approach that is constituted by the interplay between their individual social structures and their social activity behavior. More explicitly, individuals' networks are a context within which to elicit social activity-travel generation, spatial distribution, and information communication and technology use. The resultant dataset links aspects, in novel ways, that have been rarely studied together, and provides a sound base of theory and method to study and potentially give new insights about social activity-travel behavior.

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The Toronto Area Scheduling Model for Household Agents (TASHA), a new prototype activity scheduling microsimulation model, generates activity schedules and travel patterns for a 24-h typical weekday for all persons in a household. The prototype model is based solely on conventional trip diary data and therefore is applicable in many urban areas where activity data may not be available. The model makes use of the concept of the project, a "container" of activities with a common goal, to organize activity episodes into the schedules of persons in a household. A heuristic, or rule-based, method is used to organize activities into projects and then to form schedules for interacting household members. The TASHA model is considered to be a successful first attempt to operationalize a generalized conceptual model of household decision making, with reasonable correspondence between model and observed trip rates and chain characteristics.

This paper describes the development of an operational prototype for a comprehensive microsimulation model of urban systems. It examines several important design advances that emerged during the transition from a conceptual framework to operational code. ILUTE (Integrated Land Use, Transportation, Environment) simulates the evolution of an integrated urban system over an extended period of time. This model is intended to replace conventional models for the analysis of a broad range of transportation, housing and other urban policies. An overview of the ILUTE framework was presented at the 9th IATBR conference (Miller and Salvini, 2001). Since then, considerable progress has been made on the overall model and its component sub-models. At present, an operational prototype is being tested using data from the Greater Toronto Area.

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