With increasing focus on more nuanced aspects of quality of life, the phenomenon of urban visual pollution has been progressively gaining attention from researchers and policy makers, especially in the developed world. However, the subjectivity and complexity of assessing visual pollution in urban settings remain a challenge, especially given the lack of robust and reliable methods for quantification of visual pollution. This paper presents a novel systematic approach for the development of a robust Visual Pollution Assessment (VPA) tool. A key feature of our methodology is explicit and systematic incorporation of expert and public opinion for listing and ranking Visual Pollution Objects (VPOs). Moreover, our methodology deploys established empirical complex decision-making techniques to address the challenge of subjectivity in weighting the impact of individual VPOs. The resultant VPA tool uses close-ended options to capture the presence and characteristics of various VPOs on a given node. Based on these inputs, it calculates a point based visual pollution scorecard for the observation point. The performance of the VPA tool has been extensively tested and verified at various locations in Pakistan. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such tool, both in terms of quantitative robustness and broad coverage of VPOs. Our VPA tool will help regulators in assessing and charting visual pollution in a consistent and objective manner. It will also help policy makers by providing an empirical basis for gathering evidence; hence facilitating evidence-based and evidence-driven policy strategies, which are likely to have significant impact, especially in the developing countries.

Urban visual pollution is increasingly affecting the built-up areas of the rapidly urbanizing planet. Outdoor advertisements are the key visual pollution objects affecting the visual pollution index and revenue generation potential of a place. Current practices of uninformed and uncontrolled outdoor advertising (especially billboards) impairs effective control of visual pollution in developing countries. Improving this can result in over 20% reduction of visual pollution. This article presents a spatial decision support system (SDSS) to facilitate all the stakeholders (development control authorities, advertisers, billboard owners, and the public) in balancing the optimal positioning of billboards under the governing regulations. In terms of its technical implementation, SDSS is based on well-known geospatial open source technologies and uses an analytical hierarchy process AHP-inspired approach in spatial decision-making. It can help users through its category-specific user interface to identify potential sites to position new billboards and the selection of boards from existing sites based on a wide variety of characteristics. The observations of all stakeholders have been recorded through panel feedback to assess the system’s initial effectiveness. The proposed system has been found functional in identifying hot spots for the focused management and exploration of the best suitable sites for new billboards. So, it helps the advertising agencies, urban authorities, and city councils in better planning and management of existing billboard locations to optimize revenue and improve urban aesthetics. The system can be replicated in other countries irrespective of spatial boundaries by incorporating jurisdictional rules and regulations.

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Urban surroundings and spaces are losing their identity due to the flooded visual pollution in the urban panorama of already densely populated cities in developing countries. Quantitative assessment of visual pollution and its spatial mapping; both are very recent and relatively un-explored branches of urban studies. The diversity of visual pollution objects (VPOs) and their traits, the subjectivity of observers, the scale of urban space and dependency on subjective variables has been key challenges for quantification during visual pollution assessment. The researcher has previously developed a paper-based score-card type visual pollution assessment (VPA) tool using Analytical Hierarchy Process (under publication) to address these issues. However, considering the challenges associated with the deployment of paper-based tool for VPA (inability to handle variety of data types i.e. text, numeric, geolocation, images etc.), the natural progression has been the development of a mobile-based solution which matches the fast-growing mobile penetration rate of urban centers and provides a turn-key solution to achieve efficiency and effectiveness in primary data collection. On the other hand, academic research on the spatial mapping of visual pollution has slightly progressed to explore its cartographic dimension. This research presents a spatial decision support system comprising of a combination of open source tools to collect, store and present visual pollution assessment data for any urban space of any scale. The system employs Open Data Kit (ODK) to build its mobilebased VPA tool which can be used to collect VPO attributes using any android device. The collected data is streamed to a web-based data management module of the system in real time which is built upon ODK Aggregate and PostgreSQL. Furthermore, the web-based visualization module of the system is built upon some other major open source tools including OpenGeo Suite and PHP. The visualization module presents the results of visual pollution index (VPI) in the form of a web-based dashboard containing real-time choropleth maps which can be filtered for any specific VPO.This research demonstrates the strengths of open geospatial tools to solve challenges of primary data collection on a diverse range of VPOs along with the systematic capturing of their spatial location and visual images. Furthermore, it proves the ability of open source web mapping tools to display visual pollution assessments in most appropriate cartographic representation.