Christopher Pettit

An integrated planning tool based upon multiple criteria evaluation of spatial information

Despite the widespread adoption of geographical information systems (GIS) in local government for parcel mapping and asset management, the full potential of GIS has not yet been realised. GIS is mainly used by planners for data management and querying land records. More advanced site planning has not taken advantage of the spatial analysis capability of GIS. On the basis of a user survey we identify the cause of the problem as being a disparity between the way planners solve urban design problems and the operational environment of a GIS. That is, when planners look at the tasks they need to perform to solve a problem they have difficulty relating this to operations provided by a GIS. The paper proposes a solution that involves integrating a rigorous decision-making procedure with spatial analysis and presenting this through an interface specifically designed for planners. The decision theory approach is based upon multi-criteria evaluation (MCE). Spatial analysis is used for defining design factors in MCE and again in the evaluation process to aggregate factors in the final solution. As a proof-of-concept a prototype system was developed customised to the way planners formulate and evaluate design problems. The prototype is demonstrated with a site control planning exercise within a city region.

Use of a Collaborative GIS-Based Planning-Support System to Assist in Formulating a Sustainable-Development Scenario for Hervey Bay, Australia:

Planning-support systems offer an effective way of integrating social, economic, and environmental datasets, enabling a number of holistic spatial planning scenarios to be generated and evaluated by local planners. With increased acceptance of computer technology as a platform for the development and delivery of professional tools, planning-support systems (PSSs) may well be embraced by practitioners to improve current practices, just as computer-aided design (CAD) has been widely accepted by architects as a useful design and visualisation tool. There is some perceived optimism, (or realism?) that this may be the case sooner rather than later. It is believed that ‘What if?’ is one such PSS which is suitable for enhancing current planning practice. The author provides a technical and experiential examination of an application of the What if? PSS in assisting in the formulation of a sustainable land use strategy for Hervey Bay, Australia, supplementing previous published results. The focus of the research is to examine the underlying model and discuss the collaborative application of the PSS with local planners in a scenario-building exercise. Furthermore, the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the PSS are outlined from the perspective of the urban modeller, together with ex-ante feedback from the local planners on the use of the PSS to formulate urban-growth scenarios. In conclusion, the merits of the use of such a PSS are discussed and some future directions for the development of collaborative spatial decision-support tools are offered.

SIEVE: Collaborative Decision-making in an Immersive Online Environment

Over the recent years, spatial data have become more accessible to members of the public, and there is an increased awareness that spatial data are an essential ingredient in the development of governance policies. In parallel, computing devices that can render real-time 3D environments in nearly photo-realistic quality have become a common household item. Integrating spatial data and virtual environments opens the possibility of presenting spatial data in a highly visual way—the same way we experience our everyday world. We have developed a landscape planning tool called SIEVE (Spatial Information and Visualization Environment), which allows users to explore existing spatial data and hypothetical future scenarios in a real-time 3D environment, links to environmental process models outcomes, and also provides a collaborative decision-making environment. SIEVE has an automatic model-building component that allows users to select a region on a 2D map using a web portal and to download automatically generated 3D landscape environments. SIEVE not only models above-ground features but also incorporates underground features. This allows users to see the connection between below- and above-ground processes. Lastly, SIEVE incorporates a multi-user environment that allows users from different locations to gather in the virtual landscapes for exploring and decision-making purposes.

The Australia urban research gateway

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Evaluation of data visualisation options for land-use policy and decision making in response to climate change

20m Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) project (www.aurin.org.au) began in July 2010. AURIN has been tasked with developing a secure, Web‐based virtual environment (e‐Infrastructure) offering seamless, secure access to diverse, distributed and extremely heterogeneous data sets from numerous agencies with an extensive portfolio of targeted analytical and visualization tools. This is being provisioned for Australia‐wide urban and built environment researchers – itself a highly heterogeneous collection of research communities with diverse demands, through a unified urban research gateway. This paper describes these demands and how the e‐Infrastructure and gateway is being designed and implemented to accommodate this diversity of requirements, both from the user/researcher perspective and from the data provider perspective. The scaling of the infrastructure is presented and the way in which it copes with the spectrum of big data challenges (volume, veracity, variability and velocity) and associated big data analytics. The utility of the e‐Infrastructure is also demonstrated through a range of scenarios illustrating and reflecting the interdisciplinary urban research now possible. Copyright

A Way Forward for Land-Use Planning to Achieve Policy Goals by Using Spatial Modelling Scenarios

Decision makers are facing unprecedented challenges in addressing the likely impacts of climate change on land use. Changes to climate can affect the long-term viability of certain industries in a particular geographical location. Government policies in relation to provision of infrastructure, management of water, and incentives for revegetation need to be planned. Those responsible for key decisions are unlikely to be expert in all aspects of climate change or its implications, and thus require scientific data communicated to them in an easily understood manner with the scope to explore the implications. It is often felt that a range of visualisation techniques, both abstract and realistic, can assist in this communication. However, their effectiveness is seldom evaluated. In this paper we review the literature on processes for the evaluation of visualisation tools and representations. From this review an evaluation framework is developed and applied through an experiment in visualisation of climate change, land suitability, and related data using a variety of tools and representational options to advance our knowledge of which visualisation technique works, when, and why. Our region of interest was the southwestern part of Victoria, Australia. Both regional and local data and their implications were presented to end users through a series of visualisation products. The survey group included policy makers, decision makers, extension staff, and researchers. They explored the products and answered both specific and exploratory questions. At the end of the evaluation session their knowledge and attitudes were compared with those at the commencement and they were also asked to assess the visualisation options subjectively. The findings relate to both the visualisation options themselves and the process of evaluation. The survey group was particularly keen to have access to multiple interactive tools and the ability to see scenarios side-by-side within a deeper informational context. A number of procedural recommendations for further evaluation were developed, including the need for consistency in approach among researchers in order to develop more generalisable findings.

The Online What if? Planning Support System

This paper investigates how demographic (socioeconomic) and land-use (physical and environmental) data can be integrated within a decision support framework to formulate and evaluate land-use planning scenarios. A case-study approach is undertaken with land-use planning scenarios for a rapidly growing coastal area in Australia, the Shire of Hervey Bay. The town and surrounding area require careful planning of the future urban growth between competing land uses. Three potential urban growth scenarios are put forth to address this issue. Scenario A (‘continued growth’) is based on existing socioeconomic trends. Scenario B (‘maximising rates base’) is derived using optimisation modelling of land-valuation data. Scenario C (‘sustainable development’) is derived using a number of social, economic, and environmental factors and assigning weightings of importance to each factor using a multiple criteria analysis approach. The land-use planning scenarios are presented through the use of maps and tables within a geographical information system, which delineate future possible land-use allocations up until 2021. The planning scenarios are evaluated by using a goal-achievement matrix approach. The matrix is constructed with a number of criteria derived from key policy objectives outlined in the regional growth management framework and town planning schemes. The authors of this paper examine the final efficiency scores calculated for each of the three planning scenarios and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the three land-use modelling approaches used to formulate the final scenarios.

An On-line Planning Support System to Evaluate Urban and Regional Planning Scenarios

The chapter introduces the Online What if? (OWI) GIS-based planning support system, which is being made available through the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN). AURIN has been established to provide an advanced information infrastructure to support discipline-specific and multi-disciplinary research and promote sustainable urban development in Australia. OWI is an open source online version of the widely used desktop What if? planning support system developed by Klosterman (1999). OWI enables a range of end users to create and explore what if? land use change scenarios. This chapter discusses OWI in the context of a demonstrator case study in Hervey Bay, Queensland, and introduces future applications of this collaborative planning tool to support the sustainable planning of cities in Australia.

Effective Community Engagement for Sustainability: Wombat Community Forest Management Case Study

This chapter describes the development of a planning internet site incorporating a suite of spatial decision support system tools to undertake multi-scaled planning analysis. Current functionality allows users to perform dynamic analyses of regional demographic and employment trends toformulate thematic map and associated tabular data results. At the local urban level, users can review the results of a number of ‘what-if’ planning scenarios based on a multiple criteria evaluation approach. The site has been built at the regional levelfor the Wide Bay-Burnett region in Queensland, Australia, and within it, at the local urban level for the rapidly growing and expanding Hervey Bay local government area.

Reconnecting urban planning with health: a protocol for the development and validation of national liveability indicators associated with noncommunicable disease risk behaviours and health outcomes

The first significant government sponsored community‐based forest management project in Australia was initiated in Central Victoria in 2002. This paper analyses the initial stage of the Wombat Community Forest Management Pilot Project. The paper develops a functional concept of ‘effective community’ for structuring community engagement in these kinds of natural resource management projects. The effective community has characteristics in common with a community of interest, adopts a bioregional perspective, embodies the values of environmental stewardship and interacts in a fully informed way as a ‘discursive community’ (Meppam 2000). The paper offers general advice for organising effective community engagement in such projects and 12 recommendations for governments developing similar initiatives elsewhere.