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
properties have been restricting end-users from exploring and reusing them. URBIS (URBan land recycling Information
services for Sustainable cities) is a European project aimed at identifying urban areas which have potential to be further
developed, as well as to extract their land use information based on open spatial data. URBIS first selected and stored
possible sites as polygons in a Green or Grey Layer. In a second step, the information about the sites like size, vegetation
coverage, and transportation connections are also calculated and attached as attributes to the polygons. At the end, the project
results are presented through online services giving end-users the possibility to not 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 already. Since the methodology and the service system developed in the project are based on open source data and
open source software, URBIS could easily be expanded to other European cities.
Using Open-Source Data and Software to Analyse Land-Use Changes and Deforestation in Marqués de Comillas, Chiapa, Mexico (Work in Progress)