Prototype Decision-Support System for Designing and Costing Municipal Green Infrastructure

There is growing momentum across many municipal jurisdictions in North America to reuse public and privately held vacant and underutilized urban land on a temporary to potentially permanent basis for community-centered and community-driven projects. Some uses include urban agriculture, parks and open spaces, and linear bikeway or walkway connections. Across many jurisdictions, limited resources have been allocated to inventorying and determining the valuation of these urban assets and their potential to contribute to a city’s green infrastructure capacity. The purpose of this research is to add an augmented capacity to an existing Microsoft Excel-based decision-support tool that captures the condition and location of vacant and underutilized land, calculates the relative suitability of the inventoried land for a suite of reuse strategies, and allows the user to evaluate location-allocation modeling scenarios. The additional capacity introduced herein provides users with the ability to produce a scaled design drawing for each allocated reuse strategy, and subsequently perform a life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) based on user-defined design scenarios. The application of the design and costing tool, known as DECO, to a portion of an underutilized hydro utility corridor in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, is presented and discussed to demonstrate the usability and inherent benefits of a graphically based LCCA approach. While developed as a decision-support tool for application by community groups, DECO has the potential to assist municipal planning staff and private and public land owners in clarifying the trade-offs between various design alternatives, given a specified life-cycle length. DECO is designed to allow the user to perform a series of “what-if” scenarios/sensitivity analyses to aid in well-informed green infrastructure investment decisions.