Brownfield land use change modeling using GIS-based Weights-of-Evidence approach

Fast and unorganized urban development increases the number of abandoned lands and brownfields within the cities. Revitalization of these lands is one of the key factors to achieve urban sustainability. Most researches on this field have mainly considered a single brownfield site for redevelopment on the bases of local neighborhood demand and characteristics. The current paper proposes a brownfields land use change modeling process in a larger scale perspectives rather than local aspects. The proposed model is a statistical-based weights-of-evidence (WoE) approach in the GIS environment. The changes probability of brownfield sites of the Qazvin city to residential land use was predicted using several urban development parameters. Next, the predicted map was aggregated with the existing brownfields map in order to evaluate by Master Plan of the Qazvin city. In this manner, existing brownfield sites are projected according to planning strategies. Results indicate that according to potential and suitability of the site and neighborhood properties, each brownfield can serve the community as single or mixture of several land use types. The advantage of this model is that, due to utilization of the standard urban parameters as well as statistical based methodology, by considering more number of land use types this process can be easily replicated in other cities for brownfields redevelopment. It is concluded that the application of land use change modeling techniques in GIS environment can provide a strong tool for brownfields redevelopment planning and strategies.