Spatial Absorbency Concept as a Decision Support System for Sustainable Local Development

Abstract

The practise of last decades of land use planning system in Poland allowed local authorities to design new land uses freely, without proper analyses. It resulted in designing in total over 10 times more area for new housing purposes than is developed as housing nowadays. To prevent this situation the amendment of the Act on planning and spatial development set, among others, the new obligation. Each municipality, before designing new land uses, needs to prepare an assessment of demand for each land use and the absorbency of existing real estate reserves for that land use but still not developed in that way. The demand analysis is defined by regulations in order to categories that have to be taken into account, while the absorbency evaluation is not. Therefore, each municipality includes different factors, uses another method and has a distinct accuracy of analysis. The purpose of this work is to present a concept of spatial absorbency calculations. The proposed method was tested in a pilot studies on a case of Jaworzyna Ślaska (Poland) in order to verify the possibility of application of the framework in practise. The sources of this study were data from spatial planning documents, available public statistics and map services. Due to the lack of detailed regulations regarding the estimation of absorbency, the proposed method was based on the review of existing spatial policies developed under the new law as well as developed individually by authors. The results of the research are helpful in preventing excessive land use designing. In addition, they provide information on the development opportunities of municipalities and their potential to invest. These calculations support the rating of not only usable area of the development, but also the number of potential new residents. The method is fully applicable in ArcGIS and CommunityViz software and may constitute the framework of decision support system for local authorities in sustainable local land use planning.