Optimizing land use with open data

In planning and urban design, evaluation of different parts of the site in terms of favorability for inteded use plays significant role in the early stages of the process. One should be able to evaluate zones of different... [ view full abstract ]

In planning and urban design, evaluation of different parts of the site in terms of favorability for inteded use plays significant role in the early stages of the process. One should be able to evaluate zones of different attributes and charasteristics objectively and set them into same scale. Besides, made decisions should be legitimately argumented. Currently in Finland there's a lot of publicly availabe nationwide GIS data that can be exploited for such tasks but practical solutions have been few this far.

In our earlier projects, we have developed a GIS based evaluation tool that uses primarily open public data to produce favourablity zones how new building should be targeted.

In the GIS scoring system – as we call it – selected data sets are combined and reduced into 250x250 m grid. Criteria for favourability consists of different types of location based characteristics, such as existing buildings, services, infrastructure, soil type, amount of traffic, landscape characteristics… Resulting grids are then combined, resulting a heat map that illustrates zones of favourability for new building.

The GIS scoring system can be used for tasks of different sorts. For example it can be used to create scenarios and structure models to illustrate different development paths for project stakeholdes like politicans and citizens or it can be used to give exact numbers and locations for new building where detailed planning isn't a favourable option such as rural areas.

This far – March 2018 – the GIS scoring system has been used in two different projects to calculate and target new buildings in a rural setting. The goal for the project is to develop the system so that it can be adapted and scaled to different settings and environments.

Further, we are beginning a new project phase in studying different possibilities to exploit the resulting data: Since multiple sorts of data of significance are combined and processed in the system, they can be also exported to other platforms – such as BIM or algorithmic aided design systems – where the can be refined and used for different purposes related to the project, such as producing 3D visualizations.