Book Excerpts:

More than 68 percent of the citizens of the world's developed countries live today in cities or in city-centered metropolitan areas. The economic and social fabric of these high-density clusters is elaborately interwoven, with the well-being of each citizen intricately enmeshed with the activities of others. Strong interdependencies arise in all areas of human need: food, shelter, safety, clothing, recreation, maintenance, energy provision, and so on. Servicing these needs requires highly structured transportation and communication networks throughout the city for effective provision of a variety of urban services: emergency medical, police, mail collection and delivery, fire protection, street and highway maintenance, utility repair, snowplowing, street cleaning, refuse collection, bus and subway transportation, taxi transportation, and so on.

Increasingly, citizens are demanding more urban services, by type, quantity, and quality. Yet the ability of most cities in the United States and elsewhere to pay for additional services has been severely strained during the 1970s. The resulting pressure, between the demands for more and better services, on the one hand, and decreased costs, on the other, has created a strong need for improved management decision making in urban services. It is a primary purpose of this book to provide methods for assisting these decisions.

In line with this book's purposes, a decision is an irrevocable allocation of resources. Thus, this book will deal with the allocation or deployment of the resources of urban service systems, including personnel, equipment, and various service-improving technologies. From this viewpoint, urban operations research can be thought of as a decision-aiding technology, one to assist urban managers in improving the deployment of their resources. Most deployments occur spatially throughout the city, so much of this book's work will have a strong spatial component.