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

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.