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The development of a holistic approach for the implementation of reuse strategies on vacant urban lands is essential if cities are to optimize the potential utility of these untapped resources as public amenity spaces, at a neighbourhood-, community-or city-wide planning scale. Many cities across the globe struggle with the presence of vacant and underutilized land in the urban environment. This is a wasted resource that has significant potential to contribute to a city's green infrastructure/amenity capacity if the suitability of reuse strategies can be better understood. This paper presents a prototype community-based decision support tool to assist neighbourhood groups in completing a user-customizable vacant and underutilized land inventory at a neighbourhood, community or city-wide planning scale. The purpose of this research is to create an inventory that captures the relevant neighbourhood and site attributes in a way that can be conveyed to the user as a 'site suitability index' (or score). This information can then be used to make more informed decisions with respect to which parcels of vacant land are most suitable for temporary reuse strategies. Developed in Microsoft Excel ® , the prototype tool allows the user to evaluate up to 15 community-based reuse strategies across three broad categories -parks, urban food production and stormwater/ecosystems management -using a hybrid binary scoring methodology. The prototype tool was applied to 25 sites across the City of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, to determine the validity of the method presented. The inventoried attributes of (i) neighbourhood quality, (ii) developability potential, (iii) visual quality, (iv) compatibility, (v) transportation and (vi) vulnerable populations were used to calculate a set of site suitability indices. The indices calculated appeared appropriate for most uses, which validated the hypothesis that the majority of the inventoried sites would have strong indices based on the fact that they currently function as public amenity spaces.

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Community groups have a growing desire to use vacant and underutilized land for urban food production purposes; however, there are limited community-based tools available to assess the suitability of sites or location-allocation decisions. The purpose of this research is to provide decision support to community groups via a scientific software product developed in Microsoft Excel  that will aid users in identifying and inventorying the location and condition of vacant and underutilized land, determining the relative site suitability of the inventoried land, and allocating urban agricultural reuse strategies across the urban landscape. This paper describes an augmented capacity to the prototype community-based decision support tool (C-SAP) developed by Kirnbauer and Baetz (2011). C-SAP includes two existing tools that employ a binary scoring methodology for the vacant and underutilized land inventory process (VULI) and the analytic hierarchy process for the calculation of a set of site suitability indices (SSI). The additional capacity introduced herein, known as LOCAL, employs a multi-objective binary integer program formulation for the location-allocation of reuse strategies at a neighborhood, community or potentially city-wide planning level. The application of the prototype decision support tool to twenty one sites identified as potential future sites for urban agriculture is summarized and discussed. This tool has the potential to assist groups in clarifying both community needs and constraints, while producing outputs that provide a scoped, informed direction to users for the allocation of reuse strategies. This paper describes a methodology for engaging community groups in making well-informed decisions related to effectively and efficiently bringing vacant and underutilized land back into productive reuse in a way that complements city-wide land use planning initiatives related to sustainable growth.