Allocating Urban Agricultural Reuse Strategies to Inventoried Vacant and Underutilized Land

Urban Farm DB summary

Amid growing interest among community groups in using vacant and underutilized land for urban food production, but with few community-based tools available to assess site suitability or location-allocation decisions, this U.S. study describes a scientific software tool, built in Microsoft Excel, to help community groups identify and inventory the location and condition of vacant and underutilized land, determine relative site suitability, and allocate urban agricultural reuse strategies across the urban landscape. The tool augments the prototype community-based decision support tool (C-SAP) developed by Kirnbauer and Baetz (2011), which already includes a binary scoring methodology for the vacant and underutilized land inventory (VULI) process and an analytic hierarchy process for calculating site suitability indices (SSI). The added capacity, called LOCAL, formulates a multi-objective binary integer program for location-allocation of reuse strategies at the neighborhood, community, or city-wide planning level. The paper summarizes and discusses applying the prototype tool to 21 sites identified as potential future urban agriculture sites.