Development of a Land Use Planning Support Tool in the Developing Countries

The purpose of this paper is to develop a land use planning support tool (LU-PST) in developing countries. LU-PST consists of an urban growth model and a land use zoning map support tool. The urban growth model is a Cellular Automata (CA) model, and population density by grid cell is calculated. The purpose of the land use zoning map support tool is to create zoning maps including residential, commercial, industrial and preservation zones. This tool used an AHP method in order to consider criterion for judgment of users. In order to develop the LU-PST, these two models were incorporated into ArcGIS (ESRI). It is possible for this tool to execute two tasks. One is for the land use zoning considered with urban growth trend. And the other is for the urban growth calculation based on a land use plan. The usefulness of LU-PST was discussed by analyzing the results of application to the Colombo Urban Area in Sri Lanka and considering comments about this tool from urban planners.