A System for Land Development Approval Management using Geographic Information Systems

In a developing Country like Sri Lanka, it is very important to plan and manage its land development programmes to attract investments to develop land resources. In this context special emphasis should be given to urban areas. The prevailing systems of issuing preliminary land development clearance by the Urban Development Authority (UDA) which is based on a manual filing system consumes significant time and is unable to provide alternative solutions to prospective developers. Most of the countries use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for similar land management work. A study was carried out, selecting Thimbirigasyaya ward of Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) to develop a GIS based lajid data management system in order to carry out the management of the land clearances in an efficient manner. Land parcel information obtained from CMC and UDA were scanned, spatial data were georeferenced and a mosaic was constructed. Input data were subjected to accuracy checks and were verified. Accuracies of data duplication, length, extent etc., were found satisfactory and adequate for UDA land clearance work. The database also incorporates the UDA conditions stipulated for location, zone and regulations enabling the checking of applications. The developed land information system was designed to include all functional aspects in the previous systems and additional capability to provide alternative solutions. The system developed using GIS was verified for computational accuracy using manual calculations. Adequacy checks were done with respect to the approved regulations. The developed Land Management Information system reduces the application processing time from 40 days to 5 days enabling quick decision-making. Present day IT tools such as Geographic Information Systems enable easy management of land parcels and possesses capability to overlay and analyze special data with minimum time. The present study highlights the data and accuracy requirements of the methodology to develop spatial databases for land development management. It also provides alternative solutions and can be used for land management policy analysis


Introduction
Sri Lanka is a developing nation in South Asia (Northern Latitude 5° 55' and 9° 50' and Eastern Longitudes 79° 42' and 81° 52'.) striving for economic development.Attracting investments and development of its land resource is very important for Sri Lanka.As such, it is important that the national development activities receive the clearances as early as possible.In this context special emphasis for land development in urban area should be given as most of the investments are attracted to urban areas.Granting of necessary clearances in urban area falls under the purview of Urban Development Authority (UDA), which is in the Ministry of Urban Development & Water Supply.The UDA grants a "Preliminary Planning Clearance" (PPQ to lands under its jurisdiction so that a developer could then obtain the local government approval for the implementation of final plans (Government Notifications 1999).

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A study of the prevailing approval system of the UDA (Figure 1) identified that the process a developer has to undergo to obtain the PPC takes an approximate duration of 45 days(Table 3).It also revealed that the present system requires an application to change hands at least 26 times.This has been indicated as the number of activities to be carried out in the process as shown in the Table 3.At the end of this application processing period if the PPC is not granted then a developer needs to identify an alternative site and resubmit an application for a fresh approval.Even if a person were ready for investment that person would not be able to seek support of the UDA, if he/she has not identified a land.The present system at UDA to grant approval is based on a mechanism where data is acquired, verified and submitted for approval through a manual filing system which consumes a significant handling time and significant field inspection & verifications time.In the present work, a GIS has been developed for land development approval and the management of such approvals at the UDA.The GIS has been verified for data accuracy, computational accuracy and the ability to provide requisite outputs for decision-making.It is noted that the scientific development of a reliable land clearance system could immensely support the engineers and others in land development activities.The selected location for the study is the Thimbirigasyaya Ward of the Colombo Urban Area.Colombo is the commercial capital of Sri Lanka, which is located in the west of the island (Figure 2).

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Site Selection and Data
The Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) covers an extent of 3729 ha and has a population density of 188 persons/ha.There are 47 wards in the CMC.The wards of CMC were compared with each other considering the updated data availability and the available opportunities for development.Out of the data available on locations, it was identified that the Thimbirigasyaya ward (Figure 2), which has an area of 162 ha and 1404 land parcels had the maximum density of vacant lots, the minimum plot coverage, minimum floor area ratio, minimum density of slums & shanty and minimum population density.The comparison of these parameters indicated that the Thimbirigasyaya ward had the maximum development potential and as a result an important area in terms of land development.The procedure for selection including the maps of base data, classification criteria, and the flowchart of selection is given in Figure 3a, 3b, & 3c.Therefore Thimbirigasyaya was selected for the land information system development and complete details of selection computatios are in Leelananda (2005).The data of Thimbirigasyaya ward in the Colombo Municipal Council (CMC) used for the study are shown in Table 1.
The Land Parcel information available at the assessment department of the CMC were scanned and taken for database preparation.These spatial data were georeferenced and a mosaic was constructed using 24 images, which were scanned in TIFF image format.Screen digitizing and attribute data table entries were done to develop the GIS.Field inspections were carried out to check map and attribute data.
The accuracy of the digital database was checked for errors during photocopying and scanning.These errors in the values used for the database were found very low (Table 2) considering the needs of the Urban Development Authority and also giving due consideration to the high land prices in the study area.Also since the UDA regulations published in the reference cited as UDA (1999) concerning the approvals also had classifications changing at intervals of 1 square meter per hectare, the data input accuracies which were much higher could be considered adequate for UDA land clearance work.Duplication

GIS Development
The present Land Clearance System and the officials involved (Figure 1) with the Preliminary Planning Clearance (PPC) were studied in detail.It was identified that the PPC involved 11 officials.This study also identified that an application for clearance had to be exchanged 26 times between these officials and consumes an approximate duration of 40 days (Table 1).The present land clearance system requires the coordination of Finance, Administration and Technical Divisions together with the planning committee to enable the assessment of an application.Based on the activities that have to be carried out, a suitable methodology for the structure of digital database was identified and then the process for the Geographic Information System (GIS) was developed accordingly (Figure 4).

GIS Accuracy
The model developed using GIS was verified for computational accuracy using manual calculations and also adequacy checks were done with respect to the approved regulations to ensure that the output through the database is the same as when the work is done manually.Randomly selected ten applications submitted for the UDA approval were tested using the GIS for the fulfillment of the approval/rejection issued by UDA.The checks indicated that the model was satisfactory with respect to both the abovementioned factors.Attribute accuracy of the GIS was checked with manual comparative checks of actual and entered data in the database.Table 5 indicates the results of testing and the indication that the same final decision was arrived by both the methods.

Structure of GIS
An assessment of the land clearance through the developed GIS indicated that the process of the land clearance could reduce the required duration to 5 days and this could be achieved by the  structured data storage and the case of analysis which reduces the number of activities to eight as shown in the columns seven and eight of Table 1.Eighteen activities of the previous system were found unnecessary with the processing of the applications using the proposed Geographic Information System for land clearance and are denoted as zero time consumption in column 8 (Table 1).

Layers and Tables
The database contains three map layers and three associated attribute data tables.The three map layers are 1) Land Parcel Layer, 2) Buildings layer and the 3) UDA Zoning Layer.The attributes tables are 1) Attribute  5) and attribute Tables (Figure 6).

The Figures 6a shows the attribute data table for
the Land Parcel layer and the Figure 7 shows the Land parcel map layer as an example of the format of GIS database.

Benefits
Management of development information in the prevailing system is done through a manual system of data extraction from field records.The GIS developed by this study enables a system whereby easy management of approvals and other details can be identified and summarized systematically, with minimum time and to  Several benefits can be achieved by the introduction of the proposed system to manage land parcel development.The system saves time, improves efficiency, encourages investors by providing alternative site locations, acts quickly while supporting managing decisions, saves costs, easy extracting and easy access to data etc., can be called as such benefits.A significant benefit to the applicant is that the present system enables the receipt of information by the applicant almost immediately.The ability of the system to query and display enables a discussion with the investor in finding alternatives for cases where the applications had been rejected due to deviation with enforced regulations.
Land Parcels Layer Building Layer Building Zone Layer The GIS also enables to identify the status of the land parcels, pending and granted approvals, alternatives available for individuals and also possible combination of land parcels for different types of developments.Therefore the developed GIS can be effectively used for the identification of land types and land availability to suit the particular needs of a developer to contribute efficiently and effectively to the country's economy.

Conclusions
i.
The study enabled the development of a GIS based land information system for accuracy acceptable for land management in urban area, using given information with respect to each land parcel presented in user applications.This system has been developed and verified for the Thimbirigasyaya Ward of the Colombo Municipal Area.
ii.It was identified that the following data and system accuracy checks would enable the development of a good geographic information system for land clearance and management.
• Accuracy of Data collection from duplicated map copies    v.The developed GIS based land information system can be used not only for land clearance management but also for the preparation of guidelines and make policy recommendations.
Systems are widely used in most countries for similar land clearances (Chandrasekhar 2003, Iftikhar and Franklyn 2002, Lee and Tan 2002, Peter and John 1988, Potdar 2003).Such systems are known to consume less time and also reliable with respect to data acquisition, storage, retrieval and analysis.Therefore if a GIS could be developed for the UDA's PPC activity then it will contribute immensely towards the National Development activities in urban areas.A GIS of this nature needs to have basic information such as Average household income, Population density, Land use, Land value, Land ownership, and basic land parcel data among others (United Nation 1995).

Figure 1 :Figure 2 :
Figure 1: Present Contributing System for Approval and the officials involved in PPC

Figure 3c :
Figure 3c: Study Area Selection Flow Chart first one ensured that attribute data are properly linked to spatial data.The second is to verify the data entry accuracy of attribute data.This check in the research process was done with randomly selected 110 land parcels which were used for attribute data checks.Attribute data of these 110 polygons were printed and checked manually with plot-wise field data for any possible data errors.Another 70 land allotments were used to check the road frontage length accuracy of spatial data.During this check three parcels were found to have significant errors probably due to an error in the original data and since this was beyond the control of the GIS, they were removed and accuracies were computed using the balance 67 parcels.The checks indicated that the accuracy level of data entry and the spatial links were very high mostly due to careful extraction from the assessment registry, and entering.The model developed was checked for its correctness with 10 Preliminary Planning Clearance (PPC) applications.These documents were processed both manually and through the GIS and results were compared.Stage-by-stage results were also compared to ensure that the digital GIS followed the checks that were required by regulations.The intermittent and final decisions were the same for both computational methods.The model testing carried out the comparison of the following; 1) Zone of proposed land,'2) Requested Activity, 3) Minimum Lot Size, 4) Maximum No of Floors, and 5) Plot Coverage according to details stipulated in UDA (1999).

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zone is intended to serve as a transitional area between the primary residential and commercial zones (Vol. 1, pp 51). 5 Concentrated Development Zone (CDZ) In this zone, high density development is permitted subject to individual merits of each site.The guidelines for high rise buildings are given in Form C of regulation 35 and other relevant regulation for high rise development as in planning and building regulation of 1999 conservation zone the process of building development is controlled by the UDA law 1999.The activities prohibited are residential, commercial, industrial and dangerous and offensive trades (Vol.1, pp 54).

Figure 4 :
Figure 4 : GIS for the Land Clearance Process

Figure 5 :
Figure 5 : Map Layers in the Land Information System Database stipulated accuracies utilizing the processing speed of the computers.

Figure 7 :
Figure 7 : Land Parcel Layer of the GIS

Minimum Lot Sizes, Minimum no of Floors, 1:1,000 Maximum no of Floors 03 Building Maps UDA Assessment Number, Usage, Building Heights, Age of 1:1,000 Building, Number of Floors, Tenancy Types, Ground Floor Area, Total Floor Area 04 Road Maps UDA
Road Name, Road Type, Road Width, Road Length 1:1,000 UDA • Urban Development Authority, CMC-Colombo Municipal Council

Table 5 :
Comparison of the prevailing and proposed Preliminary Planning Clearance SystemsNo.