A prototype community-based planning tool for evaluating site suitability for the temporary reuse of vacant lands

Abstract

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.

Environmental Status Assessment of Guruvayur Temple Precincts in Kerala, India

“…Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) [6] is attempted to identify the most suitable use for the existing parking lots within the temple precincts. The standard scale of comparison as given in table 1 is used for pair-wise comparison of criteria and alternatives to arrive at the relative priorities.…”

Allocating Urban Agricultural Reuse Strategies to Inventoried Vacant and Underutilized Land

“…For example, unprecedented policies in the Province of Ontario, Canada have placed requirements for municipalities to accommodate up to 40% of new residential growth in already built-up areas, through intensification projects directed largely to vacant and underutilized land parcels (OMPIR, 2006). Existing vacant and underutilized land parcels, including publicly or privately held residential, industrial, commercial, institutional, agricul-planning policies, and at the same time yield high value or utility for a community (de Zeeuw, 2004;Heinegg et al, 2002;Kirnbauer and Baetz, 2011;Rideout, 2010). Further driving this movement forward is the issue of community food security (Brown and Carter, 2003), with a particular focus on vulnerable, at-risk populations (HFS, 2010).…”

“…Both Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia have developed inventories on city-owned land to determine the overall suitability for community gardens and other urban agriculture uses, using high-resolution aerial photos to assess attributes including tree canopy, the presence of buildings and parking (Mendes et al, 2008). Kirnbauer and Baetz (2011) present a prototype community-based decision support tool, known as C-SAP, to assist community groups in completing a vacant and underutilized land inventory based on six umbrella criteria: neighborhood quality, developability potential, visual quality (of the site), compatibility with the urban environment, modal options, and vulnerable population characteristics. The prototype tool allows the user to evaluate up to fifteen community-based reuse strategies for vacant and underutilized land, five of which are related to urban food production, and provides the user with a set of relative site suitability indices for each strategy across all inventoried sites (Kirnbauer and Baetz, 2011).…”

“…The following paper introduces an additional capacity, hereafter referred to as LOCAL, to the community-based prototype decision support tool, known as C-SAP (Kirnbauer and Baetz, 2011), that allows the user to carry out location-allocation modeling using a multi-objective binary integer programming approach and a set of user-specified constraints. While the augmentation has the potential to evaluate all fifteen strategies in the location-allocation model, only the urban agricultural uses are employed in the application discussed herein.…”

“…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).…”