Towards the development of a monitoring system for planning policy

Abstract

Cities are constantly changing and growing. Planning regulation aims to guide the development of cities to provide the best possible quality of life for the people within them. Monitoring the effects of planning policy is an important step to improve decision-making but is often limited in practice. This study involved the construction of a browser-based mapping application as a prototype monitoring system. The study uses development permit, land use, infrastructure and service data from four case study cities—London, Chicago, Melbourne and Brisbane—to explore the mechanics and necessary prerequisites for ongoing automated monitoring. The selection of four cities allowed for comparisons to be made between the cities regarding planning system structure, data availability, suitable metrics and visualization techniques. The prototype is limited to residential land uses only but successfully demonstrates bringing together disparate datasets to communicate spatially-detailed information related to the success of planning objectives in an automated fashion.