This doctoral dissertation research aims to develop a comprehensive definition of urban open spaces and to determine the extent of environmental, social and economic impacts of open spaces on cities and the people living there. The approach I take to define urban open space is to apply fuzzy set theory to conceptualize the physical characteristics of open spaces. In addition, a 'W-green index' is developed to quantify the scope of greenness in urban open spaces. Finally, I characterize the environmental impact of open spaces' greenness on the surface temperature, explore the social benefits through observing recreation and relaxation, and identify the relationship between housing price and open space be creating a hedonic model on nearby housing to quantify the economic impact. Fuzzy open space mapping helps to investigate the landscape characteristics of existing-recognized open spaces as well as other areas that can serve as open spaces. Research findings indicated that two fuzzy open space values are effective to the variability in different land-use types and between arid and humid cities. W-Green index quantifies the greenness for various types of open spaces. Most parks in Tempe, Arizona are grass-dominant with higher W-Green index, while natural landscapes are shrub-dominant with lower index. W-Green index has the advantage to explain vegetation composition and structural characteristics in open spaces. The outputs of comprehensive analyses show that the different qualities and types of open spaces, including size, greenness, equipment (facility), and surrounding areas, have different patterns in the reduction of surface temperature and the number of physical activities. The variance in housing prices through the distance to park was, however, not clear in this research. This dissertation project provides better insight into how to describe, plan, and prioritize the functions and types of urban open spaces need for sustainable living. This project builds a comprehensive framework for analyzing urban open spaces in an arid city. This dissertation helps expand the view for urban environment and play a key role in establishing a strategy and finding decision-makings.

Trees serve as a natural umbrella to mitigate insolation absorbed by features of the urban environment, especially building structures and pavements. For a desert community, trees are a particularly valuable asset because they contribute to energy conservation efforts, improve home values, allow for cost savings, and promote enhanced health and well-being. The main obstacle in creating a sustainable urban community in a desert city with trees is the scarceness and cost of irrigation water. Thus, strategically located and arranged desert trees with the fewest tree numbers possible potentially translate into significant energy, water and long-term cost savings as well as conservation, economic, and health benefits. The objective of this dissertation is to achieve this research goal with integrated methods from both theoretical and empirical perspectives.

This dissertation includes three main parts. The first part proposes a spatial optimization method to optimize the tree locations with the objective to maximize shade coverage on building facades and open structures and minimize shade coverage on building rooftops in a 3-dimensional environment. Second, an outdoor urban physical scale model with field measurement is presented to understand the cooling and locational benefits of tree shade. The third part implements a microclimate numerical simulation model to analyze how the specific tree locations and arrangements influence outdoor microclimates and improve human thermal comfort. These three parts of the dissertation attempt to fill the research gap of how to strategically locate trees at the building to neighborhood scale, and quantifying the impact of such arrangements.

Results highlight the significance of arranging residential shade trees across different geographical scales. In both the building and neighborhood scales, research results recommend that trees should be arranged in the central part of the building south front yard. More cooling benefits are provided to the building structures and outdoor microclimates with a cluster tree arrangement without canopy overlap; however, if residents are interested in creating a better outdoor thermal environment, open space between trees is needed to enhance the wind environment for better human thermal comfort. Considering the rapid urbanization process, limited water resources supply, and the severe heat stress in the urban areas, judicious design and planning of trees is of increasing importance for improving the life quality and sustaining the urban environment.

Concerns about Peak Oil, political instability in the Middle East, health hazards, and greenhouse gas emissions of fossil fuels have stimulated interests in alternative fuels such as biofuels, natural gas, electricity, and hydrogen. Alternative fuels are expected to play an important role in a transition to a sustainable transportation system. One of the major barriers to the success of alternative-fuel vehicles (AFV) is the lack of infrastructure for producing, distributing, and delivering alternative fuels. Efficient methods that locate alternative-fuel refueling stations are essential in accelerating the advent of a new energy economy. The objectives of this research are to develop a location model and a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) that aims to support the decision of developing initial alternative-fuel stations. The main focus of this research is the development of a location model for siting alt-fuel refueling stations considering not only the limited driving range of AFVs but also the necessary deviations that drivers are likely to make from their shortest paths in order to refuel their AFVs when the refueling station network is sparse. To add reality and applicability of the model, the research is extended to include the development of efficient heuristic algorithms, the development of a method to incorporate AFV demand estimates into OD flow volumes, and the development of a prototype SDSS. The model and methods are tested on real-world road network data from state of Florida. The Deviation-Flow Refueling Location Model (DFRLM) locates facilities to maximize the total flows refueled on deviation paths. The flow volume is assumed to be decreasing as the deviation increases. Test results indicate that the specification of the maximum allowable deviation and specific deviation penalty functional form do have a measurable effect on the optimal locations of facilities and objective function values as well. The heuristics (greedy-adding and greedy-adding with substitution) developed here have been identified efficient in solving the DFRLM while AFV demand has a minor effect on the optimal facility locations. The prototype SDSS identifies strategic station locations by providing flexibility in combining various AFV demand scenarios. This research contributes to the literature by enhancing flow-based location models for locating alternative-fuel stations in four dimensions: (1) drivers' deviations from their shortest paths, (2) efficient solution approaches for the deviation problem, (3) incorporation of geographically uneven alt-fuel vehicle demand estimates into path-based origin-destination flow data, and (4) integration into an SDSS to help decision makers by providing solutions and insights into developing alt-fuel stations.

Spatial uncertainty refers to unknown error and vagueness in geographic data. It is relevant to land change and urban growth modelers, soil and biome scientists, geological surveyors and others, who must assess thematic maps for similarity, or categorical agreement. In this paper I build upon prior map comparison research, testing the effectiveness of similarity measures on misregistered data. Though several methods compare uncertain thematic maps, few methods have been tested on misregistration. My objective is to test five map comparison methods for sensitivity to misregistration, including sub-pixel errors in both position and rotation. Methods included four fuzzy categorical models: fuzzy kappa's model, fuzzy inference, cell aggregation, and the epsilon band. The fifth method used conventional crisp classification. I applied these methods to a case study map and simulated data in two sets: a test set with misregistration error, and a control set with equivalent uniform random error. For all five methods, I used raw accuracy or the kappa statistic to measure similarity. Rough-set epsilon bands report the most similarity increase in test maps relative to control data. Conversely, the fuzzy inference model reports a decrease in test map similarity.