Abstract:
The rapid growth of human population, their demands, and constructed
environment have replaced the natural environment in a significant way.
Therefore, people reconsider building up natural environment with
artificial constructions. This study is focused on sustainable development
of Urban Green Spaces (UGS), Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
and Remote Sensing (RS) technologies are very important for the study as
they have powerful spatial scientific approaches.
The present study area was Colombo Municipal Council (CMC)
administrative area with three objectives. Identification and analyzing of
existing green areas and their patterns was one objective. This was done
through supervised image classification method using high resolution
satellite images. After extracting the vegetation cover, central place theory
was used to understand the existing patterns.
The second objective was to analyze the green areas with the natural and
human factors, such as, buildings, transportation networks, bare lands,
urban heat hot spots, air pollution contaminations etc. These factors were
weighted under existing urban regulations in Sri Lanka and developed a
multi criteria model for analyzing the suitability of expanding green
spaces. According to the results, the most suitable area is less than 1% of
the total area. But 39% of the land is suitable for expanding green spaces
while another 40% cannot be expanded. Moderate suitable area is around
20%. Using these results three dimensional models and accessibility
models were developed to understand the applicability of green spaces in
selected portions of land.
Cartographic and web based GIS outputs were created to disseminate the
results as the third objective to engage responsible parties for the planning
operations. Urban planners, designers and decision makers can use the results as a decision support system with the comments submitted by the
community.
The applicability of GIS and Remote Sensing improves the decision
making power for planning green spaces towards sustainable conservation
processes in urban environment.
