The Use of Gis in Urban Planning Urban Planning and Gis
GIS is increasingly accessible to planners and is now an important tool for urban planning in developed and developing countries alike.
Abstract
GIS were developed in the late 1960s, yet in the early days very few planning departments installed them because of the prohibitive cost of hardware and the limited capabilities of the software. Most of the early software systems focused on computer mapping with few analytical functions. The most powerful software at that time was grid based (e.g. IMGRID: Sinton 1977). The subsequent fall in the prices of hardware, computer storage, and peripherals, accompanying improvement in the performance of hardware and software (particularly the speed of computer processors), and advances in the data structures and related algorithms of vector-based GIS (see Worboys, Chapter 26), has made GIS more affordable, less time consuming and more workable. Since the early 1980s, there has been a marked increase in the installation of GIS in different levels and departments of urban and regional governments in the developed countries, notably of Europe (Bardon et al 1984; Campbell 1994) and North America (French and Wiggins 1990): see Campbell, Chapter 44. With the further decrease in the price of computer hardware and software, the use of GIS has emerged in urban planning in the developing countries in the 1990s (Yeh 1991). GIS is increasingly accessible to planners and is now an important tool for urban planning in developed and developing countries alike. GIS is just one of the formalised computer-based information systems capable of integrating data from various sources to provide the information necessary for effective decision-making in urban planning (Han and Kim 1989). Other information systems for urban planning include database management systems (DBMS), decision support systems (DSS), and expert systems. GIS serves both as a database and as a toolbox for urban planning (Figure 1). In a database-oriented GIS, spatial and textual data can be stored and linked using the geo-relational model. Current GIS support efficient data retrieval, query, and mapping. Planners can also extract data from their databases and input them to other modelling and spatial analysis programs. When combined with data from other tabular databases or specially conducted surveys, geographical information can be used to make effective planning decisions. As a toolbox, GIS allows planners to perform spatial analysis using geoprocessing functions such as map overlay, connectivity measurement, and buffering (Berry 1987; Tomlin 1990). Of all the geoprocessing functions, map overlay is probably the most useful tool. This is because planners have a long tradition of using map overlay in Urban planning is one …