Municipal Land Use and GIS
Have you automated a municipal land use plan? Do you see any merit in converting free-form text documents to structured tables? What are the implications and is it even possible?
Very few municipal GIS in Ontario today could display the permitted building envelope of a land parcel, in either 2-D or 3-D; neither the data nor the systems will support it. The data, actually the Zoning By-law document, would have to be constructed in such a way as to be able to identify all of the set-backs and height restrictions for every single parcel. Zoning By-laws are written in the form of an unstructured (freeform) narrative divided into sections by legal and literary convention. Thus, parcels associated with a specific land use type, such as low density residential, might note that generally front set-backs are 5 m and side set-backs are 2 m unless the parcel is at a street corner or adjacent to a school (or is a school). Maximum density or coverage is in a separate clause, as are any height restrictions.
What if you wanted to check whether an object was set back appropriately within its own parcel of land? What if you wanted to visualize the general massing of proposed new development based on existing land use designations or restrictions?
Land use designations (Official Plans and Secondary Plans), land use restrictions (Zoning) and existing land use (Ontario Assessment System – OASYS) are common layers in municipal GIS. They tend to be polygons with a few displayed attributes or relatively simple links between text documents and pre-defined polygons. In more sophisticated situations, the land use types are nested to allow lesser or greater levels of detail or generalization. Typical examples would be the Official Plan for Fort Frances or the City of Waterloo’s Zoning Map.
It’s true that land use values can be combined with other data and used in queries to distinguish useful patterns for a wealth of purposes from epidemiology to transportation planning. The Ontario Propane Safety Review Report suggests using GIS to understand the influence of the land use on one parcel of land, or one object within one parcel of land, on adjacent lands. This is commonly done by municipalities to establish buffers around noxious, noisy or, in this case potentially dangerous, objects.
Often Zoning information is in multiple documents, such as By-law Amendments, Minor Variances, Approved Site Plans, or Exceptions. Sometimes a municipality is covered by many different Zoning By-laws for different geographic areas or re-use the same designations for different land uses (e.g. I = Industrial and I = Institutional). Sometimes zoning applies to only part of a parcel or a structure, or is a blob not aligned with parcel boundaries. This is only the tip of the iceberg. While a municipal Zoning Map appears very straightforward, the text frequently runs to hundreds of pages, covering exceptions, variations, dependencies, conditional restrictions and options.
Some municipalities have extracted the content of the zoning documents into structured tables, but it is always painful and time-consuming, difficult to maintain and, by law, not the official representation. In many situations, this copied version is not permitted, even for convenience, to be used in public-facing GIS applications, usually for good reason. Inevitably, the structured copy misses content from some obscure but critical document that changes the land use definition completely.
Someday, GIS use associated with land use will have to evolve to the next level: moving structured non-geospatial data to structured format and then standardizing the structured content. This is clearly moving out of the realm of the computer techie and into mainstream business practices. Would the average planner or lawyer ever agree to have the official municipal Zoning By-law built only as a database, with the contents displayed for convenience as a document? Would it ever be possible to actually structure regulations that apply to land use restrictions in a way that would be simple enough to structure as a database. Conversely, would it ever be possible for a database to be constructed with enough complexity and conditional relationships to allow for the flexibility needed for effective and imaginative land use legislation?
The conventional wisdom is that computers are not capable of human reasoning and that all attempts at so-called “artificial intelligence” are doomed to failure when put to the real test. I contend that it is time to look at the overall process of designating, restricting and identifying land use through the lens of the computer program. Perhaps it is time to deconstruct the process and content of municipal land use management and put it back together much more simply and logically, and in a way that makes it easy to use, maintain and integrate. Not everything is rocket science.
Please let me know your thoughts. Take care, and stay well…
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Great blog topic! This future thinking type of information management approach should become part of regulation packages to create the standards necessary for such complex processes that involve multiple actors.
Perhaps, twenty years from now planners will be donning virtual reality goggles and walking development proposal sites to determine if there will be any negative impacts to a natural heritage feature.
Ah but don’t members of any profession (planners or otherwise) wish us to believe that everything is rocket science? I believe various fields maintain their hegemony of their particular corner of society through the use of unfamiliar jargon and purposefully complicating simple matters. I would agree that looking at land use through the lens of computer programs would greatly improve the existing system in many ways but mostly in ease of access and understanding by non-planners. Full blown artificial intelligence is overkill. A simple category algorithm with a human check would probably suffice for most purposes. I suspect most planners would feel threatened by this and resist the change.
Your thoughts?
This is indeed a great blog topic and addresses probably the biggest elephant in the room when it comes to GIS in Southern Ontario …that being the state of, or chaos that is GIS, and the lack of information management, in application to municipal land use planning. Thanks for having the guts to put it up here.
Immediate thought that jumps to mind is that as you mention most municipal land use planning data sets do not support the business drivers for day to day operational planning and are stuck more or less in support of the coarser level policy planning at best. This jump needs to be made. How can you regulate anything effectively that isn’t mapped to the level of detail you are dealing with it on…in these examples, in the context of a single parcel.
Complicating matters is the fact that, as the previous commenter states, that there are many actors in this arena, making the development of standards, exchange of knowledge (particularly that which is tacit) and the leverage of new technologies to make it all possible a feat of coordination which there has been little precedent for. Even if all of this, the turf wars, and the all the other unmentioned nonesense can be circumnavigatied, the other commentator still highlights a significant related point as well that munipal planners aren’t likely going to be open minded about what lets face is nothing less than the requirement of a dramatic culture change within their profession.
With that said, and in all fairness to the current anarchy, the province hasn’t exactly demonstrated the greatest leadership here either. Don’t all OPs get submitted to the province? Could conformity to a minimal practical standard during this process function as a logical starting point? Time for MMAH to ‘giddy-up’ on that one. They should watch the MOE source protection space …some painfull and some really good lessons there to be learned.
In my neck of the woods the local planners several years ago formally agreed to work towards an integrated GIS when reviewing how they do business together. They had absolutely no idea what they agreed to and I believe most of them simply conceptualized some kind of centralized web portal (like anybody needs another of those!) with all of their existing unstandardized land use planning data essentially mashed up on it. Instead the idea of a ‘distributed’ integrated GIS built on data standards and emerging web services in check with business drivers identified through established workflows based on functional interdependancies was pitched. Over ambitious…for sure but completely possible from a technology standpoint, and for a moment they acrually saw the proverbial light, however unfortunately there has been absolutely no progress to date in terms of implementation as its stalled on its way up through the executive levels for approval, funding etc.
My guess… its generally still too novel a concept to understand…which unfortunately although I largely agree with you is where the ‘overall process of designating, restricting and identifying land use through the lens of the computer program’ probably sits as well. They simply do not get it yet.
‘Perhaps it is time to deconstruct the process and content of municipal land use management and put it back together much more simply and logically, and in a way that makes it easy to use, maintain and integrate.’…despite the present issues and barriers I’ve expressed, I will thump the table with a rowdy ‘Here, Here! and second your motion. Who doesn’t like a good challenge these days (besides, its a while before I have to retire anyways)!