09 April 2007: ESRI Press has released a book intended to help land-use planners, architects, and others predict how development will change the landscape over the long term. Smart Land-Use Analysis: The Land-Use Conflict Identification Strategy ( LUCIS ) Model demonstrates how GIS technology can improve the way we plan today’s development for future generations.
Written by University of Florida professors Margaret Carr and Paul Zwick, Smart Land-Use Analysis: The LUCIS Model discusses the difficulty of monitoring development over time and describes an analysis process that uses spatial modeling to predict land-use trends. This guide for land-use planners, analysts, and students explains a new land-use conflict identification strategy (LUCIS). Developed by the authors, the LUCIS model uses ESRI’s ArcGIS geoprocessing framework, particularly ModelBuilder, to analyze suitability and preference for urban, agricultural, conservation, and other major land-use categories. The model helps users build land-use scenarios and determine potential future conflict among the categories.
“Land-use decision making is particularly important as we accommodate our growing population and often compromise our environment,” ESRI President Jack Dangermond writes in the book’s foreword. “LUCIS will help us understand the unintended consequences of incremental decision making.”
The first part of Smart Land-Use Analysis explains the historical development and foundational principles of LUCIS. The second part leads readers though a case study of nine counties in Florida, with a step-by-step breakdown of how LUCIS was applied. Part three discusses additional applications for LUCIS and potential future ramifications of urban sprawl.
