Allocating Urban Agricultural Reuse Strategies to Inventoried Vacant and Underutilized Land

Abstract

Community groups have a growing desire to use vacant and underutilized land for urban food production purposes;
however, there are limited community-based tools available to assess the suitability of sites or location-allocation decisions.The
purpose of this research is to provide decision support to community groups via a scientific software product developed in Microsoft
Excel that will aid users in identifying and inventorying the location and condition of vacant and underutilized land, determining the
relative site suitability of the inventoried land, and allocating urban agricultural reuse strategies across the urban landscape. This paper
describes an augmented capacity to the prototype community-baseddecision support tool (C-SAP) developed by Kirnbauer and Baetz
(2011). C-SAP includes two existing tools that employ a binary scoring methodology for the vacant and underutilized land inventory
process (VULI) and the analytic hierarchy process for the calculation of a set of site suitability indices (SSI). The additional capacity
introduced herein, known as LOCAL, employs a multi-objective binary integer program formulation for the location-allocation of
reuse strategies at a neighborhood, community or potentially city-wide planning level. The application of the prototype decision
support tool to twenty one sites identified as potential future sites for urban agriculture is summarized and discussed. This tool has the
potential to assist groups in clarifying both community needs and constraints, while producing outputs that provide a scoped, informed
direction to users for the allocation of reuse strategies. This paper describes a methodology for engaging community groups in making
well-informed decisions related to effectively and efficiently bringing vacant and underutilized land back into productive reuse in a
way that complements city-wide land use planning initiatives related to sustainable growth.

Keywords: urban food production, food urbanism, decision support, analytic hierarchy process, land inventory, site suitability