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ABSTRACT:Urban sprawl and the related landscape fragmentation is a Europe-wide challenge in the context of sustainable urban planning. The URBan land recycling Information services for Sustainable cities (URBIS) project aims for the development, implementation, and validation of web-based information services for urban vacant land in European functional urban areas in order to provide end-users with site specific characteristics and to facilitate the identification and evaluation of potential development areas. The URBIS services are developed based on open geospatial data. In particular, the Copernicus Urban Atlas thematic layers serve as the main data source for an initial inventory of sites. In combination with remotely sensed data like SPOT5 images and ancillary datasets like OpenStreetMap, detailed site specific information is extracted. Services are defined for three main categories: i) baseline services, which comprise an initial inventory and typology of urban land, ii) update services, which provide a regular inventory update as well as an analysis of urban land use dynamics and changes, and iii) thematic services, which deliver specific information tailored to end-users' needs.

ABSTRACT:Urban sprawl and the related landscape fragmentation is a Europe-wide challenge in the context of sustainable urban planning. The URBan land recycling Information services for Sustainable cities (URBIS) project aims for the development, implementation, and validation of web-based information services for urban vacant land in European functional urban areas in order to provide end-users with site specific characteristics and to facilitate the identification and evaluation of potential development areas. The URBIS services are developed based on open geospatial data. In particular, the Copernicus Urban Atlas thematic layers serve as the main data source for an initial inventory of sites. In combination with remotely sensed data like SPOT5 images and ancillary datasets like OpenStreetMap, detailed site specific information is extracted. Services are defined for three main categories: i) baseline services, which comprise an initial inventory and typology of urban land, ii) update services, which provide a regular inventory update as well as an analysis of urban land use dynamics and changes, and iii) thematic services, which deliver specific information tailored to end-users' needs.

The optimization of urban land use is a very important aspect of sustainable urban development, including recycling abandoned land and further developing in-use areas. However, limited knowledge of these kinds of areas and their properties have been restricting end-users from exploring and reusing them. URBIS (URBan land recycling Information services for Sustainable cities) is a European project aimed at identifying urban areas which have potential to be further developed, as well as to extract their land use information based on open spatial data. URBIS first selected and stored possible sites as polygons in a Green or Grey Layer. In a second step, the information about the sites like size, vegetation coverage, and transportation connections are also calculated and attached as attributes to the polygons. At the end, the project results are presented through online services giving end-users the possibility to not only view all these areas but also select their own areas of interest according to particular attributes. The URBIS strategy has been successfully implemented in three pilot cities already. Since the methodology and the service system developed in the project are based on open source data and open source software, URBIS could easily be expanded to other European cities.