Allocating Urban Agricultural Reuse Strategies to Inventoried Vacant and Underutilized Land

Abstract

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.

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

“…'community gardens had the highest site suitability index at site 1 when compared to community gardens at all other sites'). Kirnbauer and Baetz (2012) address this issue and assist users in carrying out locationallocation analyses to obtain the maximum utility across the desired planning scale, based on userspecified, adjustable constraints such as the (i) maximum number of each type of land use desired, (ii) minimum distance between each classification of use, (iii) minimum residential density required to support each use, (iv) minimum and maximum site area requirements to support each use and (v) sunlight penetration. Costs for land rehabilitation and land-use implementation were not included in the modules described within this paper in an attempt to avoid prematurely eliminating alternatives as there is a precedent in several Canadian jurisdictions for private and public sector donations.…”

“…The decision support tools described within this paper (VULI and SSI) do not assign a 'best use' to a vacant site; rather, they provide the user with a series of SSIs for a particular land use across all inventoried vacant or underutilized sites. Kirnbauer and Baetz (2012) introduce an augmented capacity to C-SAP for allocating land uses to vacant sites based on a series of user-specified constraints and a binary integer program formulation.…”

Exploring Outdoor Solar Potential in High-Density Living: Analyzing Direct Sunlight Duration for Urban Agriculture in Seoul’s Residential Complexes

“…A common implementation strategy is to make use of vacant or underutilized land. City planners gather geographical information system (GIS) or aerial imagery to identify vacant lots, open spaces, and underutilized parts of their jurisdiction to build an inventory of where farming can occur that serves the local community [6,25,26]. While these efforts are most relevant for cities with sprawling low-density development patterns where potential land could be easily found, higher density cities, in which vacant or underused land is scarce, need other approaches to finding spaces to practice urban agriculture.…”

Planning Water Resources Allocation Under Multiple Uncertainties Through a Generalized Fuzzy Two-Stage Stochastic Programming Method

“…Fuzzy mathematical programming (FMP), as a branch of fuzzy set theory, was applied to tackle non-probabilistic uncertainties in water resources management [2][3][4][5][6] [23][24], [27][28][29], [40][41][42][43][44][45]. For example, Slowinski [49] proposed an interactive fuzzy multiobjective linear programming method and applied it to water supply planning.…”