Municipal Planning

My friend Rick has been recently hired as an intern in Salzburg Municipality and is assisting the team who are performing municipal planning for settlement. Before assigning the actual work, the team ask him to present the use of a Geospatial tool in municipal planning so that the team can assign him, his level of work accordingly.

For his first presentation in the municipality, Rick came up with an idea of Performing Overlay Analysis on Physical texture of Urban Area. He planned to show an overview of the Urban Fabrics within a District and the type of geology it was built on. The Land Use Land Cover (LULC) dataset produced by European Environment Agency published in  Copernicus Urban Atlas  for Salzburg was used along with the District Boundary and Geology Dataset from the ZGIS server.

In the LULC dataset, the category of Urban Fabric was categorised into five types based on the density i.e. Continuous Urban Fabric (S.L. > 80%), Discontinuous Dense Urban Fabric (S.L. : 50% - 80%), Discontinuous Low Density Urban Fabric (S.L. : 10% - 30%), Discontinuous Medium Density Urban Fabric (S.L. : 30% - 50%) and Discontinuous Very Low Density Urban Fabric (S.L. < 10%). These five categories were filtered out for the analysis purpose.

The intersection of the Selected Category Layer was done with the Salzburg District boundary and an output that showed the intersecting area withing the District layer as shown in the map below was generated which hold the combined attribute information of both the layer. The CODE ID and Name in the pop up of this layer are the combined attributed from the District boundary layer. In other words, it can be referred to as overlaying of the layers to get a separate overlayed layer that has combined feature. In this case, he received a polygon layer as output since he fed two polygon layer for intersection, this will vary based on the input layer.

The output of the overlay operation was better explained by displaying the layer with district coding as well as with the LULC Urban Fabric Coding.

As a next step in the process, Rick aggregated the LULC and District layer, to calculate the Statistics across the whole area in the district zone. The colour code in the layer is based on the summarized area in hectares. The visualization explains that the dark red area has high urban fabric districts whereas the dark grey represents the low urban fabric districts. The embedded popup in the will tell the majority and minority type of urban fabrics in each district.

Here the district with the least urban fabric is Rechte Altstadt/Andräviertel and with the mot urban fabric is Leopoldskron/Moos.

He performs the same steps with categorized LULC layer and Salzburg Geology layer, to present the statistics considering the LULC layer as zones.  The outcome of this process represents the common category of Lithologie in these urban fabrics. It also helped him to summarize the type of Geology found underneath of the Urban Fabric and was seen that the most common was Flussablagerung which was underneath the most of the Urban Fabric.

Out of query, he aggregated the Urban Fabric Layer with the Geology layer to calculate the value of each class of Urban fabric within different Geology zones. The outcome of the process was received as shown in the map aside. Here the maximum area with reference to geology is shown by light shades whereas darker shades represent the minimum area in hectares.

Rick successfully presented the use of the geospatial tool in municipal planning with Vector overlay analysis done on the LULC and Geology data in the districts of Salzburg. His result can contribute to the city planning to evaluate the District with the higher urban fabric and on the type of geology to accordingly perform development activities.