The optimization of urban land use is a very important aspect of sustainable urban development, including recycling abandoned land and further developing in use areas. However, limited knowledge of these kinds of areas and their property have been restricting end users to explore and reuse them. URBIS (Urban land recycling information services for sustainable cities) is a European project aiming to identify urban areas which have potential to be further developed as well as to extract their land use information based on open spatial data. Urban Atlas, satellite images, and OpenStreetMap are chosen as main input data source. Through a first selection polygons which represent land without current use, green open spaces, gaps between buildings etc. are chosen and stored in a layer named as green layer, and polygons standing for brownfields are stored in another layer called grey layer. These two layers collect urban potential development areas (PDAs) which have high possibility to be considered by decision makers. To provide a comprehensive view about PDAs, physical properties (for example, location, size), vegetation coverage, transportation information etc. are also calculated and attached as attributes to the polygons. Furthermore, our results are presented through online interactive maps. Thus, end users cannot only view all these areas but also select their own areas of interest according to particular attributes. The URBIS strategy has been successfully implemented in three pilot cities, Osnabrueck (Germany), Amiens (France), and the Moravian-Silesian Region (Czech Republic). Our site selection and property calculation methods have been done in databases and all programs are open to the public, which means URBIS provides a methodology to be expanded to other European cities.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3846/enviro.2017.127