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A GIS based planning support system for assessing financial feasibility of urban redevelopment

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Abstract

Urban densification trends combined with redevelopment increasingly moving away from large former industrial and transport sites toward existing town centres and corridors indicate redevelopment is becoming increasingly complex, difficult to plan for and undertake. The interplay between land and property markets and planning frameworks suggest city planners and urban researchers need new tools and methodologies to gain insights into ways to deliver effective responses. Despite the need, there is a limited availability of comprehensive models to fulfil the task. This paper describes a GIS-based tool to assess parcel-level financial feasibility and housing supply associated with urban redevelopment within a precinct. The tool incorporates existing and potential built form and parameters associated with the planning framework and land and property markets. Using a real case study in a workshop, tool performance was evaluated by professional urban planners in terms of its capacity to produce metrics and visualisations of potential scenarios of redevelopment. Results indicate the usefulness of the tool for emulating land market conditions and testing scenarios of planning regulation and market changes for strategic planning purposes.

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Acknowledgements

This project was funded by the City of Randwick, Australia, in 2016. The workshop and questionnaires used in the project were approved by the UNSW Human Research Ethics Committee on 16 May 2016 (HC16333). The authors would like to thank the urban planners who participated in the workshop testing the URFF PSS tool presented in this paper in a real-world case study, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable revision of the text, comments and contributions to the improvement of this paper.

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Correspondence to Simone Z. Leao.

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If the manuscript is published, the “Financial Feasibility of Urban Redevelopment GIS Toolbox” and a “sample data” will be available to any interested user for download at the “CityData” https://citydata.be.unsw.edu.au/) link at the website of the City Futures Research Centre/University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

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Leao, S.Z., Troy, L., Lieske, S.N. et al. A GIS based planning support system for assessing financial feasibility of urban redevelopment. GeoJournal 83, 1373–1392 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-017-9843-2

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