A GIS-based framework for supporting sustainable land use planning in urban renewal projects

Abstract

Land use planning plays an important role in improving land use patterns and conditions in cities. Land resources are very limited in many high-density cities such as Hong Kong and land supply is the major concern of local governments in these regions. Urban renewal is a topic emerging from some developed cities with a long history, and it aims to redevelop or revitalize the older districts/areas usually located in the central city to fit for the changing demands of urban development. Urban renewal provides an effective channel to adjusting land-use allocation and improving land-use efficiency (increasing land supply in a sense). In some developed cities with limited land and many older districts to be redeveloped, a big issue planners are facing for years is land use planning with sustainability considerations for urban renewal projects. Therefore, how to provide effective support to the planning process in these cities is a necessary research question. As documented in literature, there are three major gaps in this research area. First, the studies on sustainable land use planning are mostly limited on the theoretical and qualitative level, whereas, quantitative approaches/methods incorporating the sustainability thinking into the planning practice are rare. Second, planning support systems (PSS) are seldom used in the planning practice for they do not usually receive enough attention from planners due mainly to the mismatch between the suppliers of PSS and the users during the system development, and the high complexity of the systems. Third, a general list of criteria for land-use suitability analysis has yet to be developed for urban land evaluation, and small-scale (street/site level) land suitability analysis is a relatively neglected topic. In order to fill these research gaps and answer the research question, this research develops a GIS-based framework consisting of a planning support model and a land information database to support sustainable land use planning in urban renewal projects. Four main objectives of this research are achieved and they are (1) to identify criteria concerning sustainability (i.e. economic, social and environmental perspectives) in sustainable site planning, (2) to develop a general list of criteria (including the sustainability criteria) for land suitability assessment at the site level, (3) to conceptualize and develop a GIS-based framework (consisting of a planning support model and a land information database) as a prototype of PSS for supporting the decision-making process of land use planning in urban renewal projects, and (4) to validate the effectiveness of this framework in supporting the planning process. In the process of achieving these objectives, six research methods are used in this research: document analysis, expert interview, focus group meeting, case study, experimental study and questionnaire survey. Literature review and document analysis are used to achieve Objective 1 and Objective 2 Criteria Identification; literature review, expert interview, focus group meeting, and case study are conducted to achieve Objective 3 Conceptualization and Development of the Framework based on the criteria identified; experimental study and questionnaire survey are employed to achieve Objective 4 Framework Validation. The research conclusions include major findings from the document analysis, expert interviews, case study, and experimental studies. Ultimately, the results of this validation process prove that the framework developed in the research can support the decision-making process of land use planning in urban renewal projects by facilitating planners to analyze the land-use suitability, helping the other stakeholders understand the planning considerations of the planners, and further improving public engagement during the planning processes. This research has contributed to new knowledge and improved the decision-making process of land use planning in urban renewal projects. The main contributions of this research are: (1) this research has identified general criteria for land-use decision-making in site planning (including sustainability criteria) and the sources of the associated data/information; (2) this research has developed a GIS-based framework which can be regarded as a prototype of a PSS for land use planning in Hong Kong; (3) this research has developed a quantitative approach to assessing land-use suitability for land sites to be redeveloped (i.e. the planning support model) and a standard means of providing the usable data for the model (i.e. the steps of the land-info database setup); (4) this research has demonstrated the usefulness of GIS visualization and spatial analysis in land use planning, in particular, site redevelopment planning, and expanded GIS applications to the planning practice.