# Urban Land Use Survey Methods: A Discussion on Their Evolution
## 3 Survey Methods in the Spotlight of Academic Research  
All this professional activity in land uses surveys, stimulated by developments in planning legislation and in transportation studies (the latter requiring extensive land use surveys, see: [12], [60] (p. 117)), seems to have triggered corresponding academic research. Specialized studies and monographs, as well as extensive sections in planning textbooks, dealing exclusively with the methodology of urban surveys, were published. For example, [PERSON]'s book [54], published in 1952, included five chapters on techniques and methods for the survey and representation of urban space (Chapters 5 to 10), as well as one section (Section 9.2) specifically focused on the survey and representation of land uses. It should be noted that [PERSON]'s book was regarded as one of the major reference books on town planning and maintained this position for more than a decade [14; 53]. A few years later, in 1963, [PERSON] published a book specifically focusing on surveys for town and country planning, which covered the issue of urban surveys even more comprehensively and in detail, devoting a chapter specifically to land use and building surveys [61] (pp. 108-129). The annotated bibliography _Selected References on Land Use Inventory Methods_, authored by [PERSON] in 1969 summarizes the sheer volume of the relevant literature produced at that time [12]. In essence, most of the contributions discussed so far are collections of the accumulated empirical knowledge gradually gained through the conduct of urban surveys. However, a limited number of studies have moved away from empiricism and adopted a more scientific approach. This represents a major shift, marking the transition from one era to another. This shift towards more scientific approaches is, of course, part of a wider turn towards positivism, most notably in urban and human geography in the work of [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [62; 63]. In the case of land use survey methods, the contributions influenced by this new approach formulated the basic theoretical and methodological principles and contributed to the development and refinement of the relevant terminology. This was achieved through placing the entire survey process within a broader epistemological framework or through treating land use surveys as an autonomous field of research. Such contributions originated from two different starting points:  
The first is the _Urban Land Use Planning_ textbook, published by [PERSON] in 1957 (2 nd edition in 1965), in which he devoted two chapters to the survey of urban land uses [64]. In trying to assess his work, we may note that his endeavor promoted land use surveying theory and methodology in a number of ways:  
1. Initially, he refined land use terminology (an issue that is still open to discussion and further enhancement; see: [4]) through defining '_urban activities_' as the functional and dynamic elements of urban space that take spatial expression in the form of '_land uses_'. 2. He placed the survey and analysis of urban activities into a systems-thinking framework, in which the city planner must examine and interpret the evolution of activity systems in order to predict their future form and, eventually, to plan them in terms of land uses. In addition, he envisaged a '_continuing inventory system_', which would serve as an '_advanced warning system_' for anticipating important changes in the locus of activity patterns (see: [2]) (pp. 221-226 and 255). 3. He merged the following into a single framework of understanding: the typology of activities, the existing behavior patterns (i.e., movements of people, goods, and services among the different types of activities), the resulting spatial patterns, and the study of their possible future form, as well as their planning (pp. 226-231). 4. He provided the methods to be used for the survey and study of each special type of activity (i.e., firms, institutions, and households) and their sub-classes (pp. 231-253). 5.