CORP – Competence Center of Urban and Regional Planning
Abstract
Out of South Asian countries, Pakistan is experiencing the fastest urbanization rate where more than half of the population will reside in urban areas after next seven years. Such a rapid transformation in urban areas calls for an extraordinary response from spatial planning agencies. Handling of complex urban phenomena with precision and time efficiency has created the dire need for shifting from manual planning processes to computer-assisted planning approaches. Although, previous studies on spatial planning practices in Pakistan have highlighted the stages and processes where adoption of planning support systems (PSS) can help improve the planning outcomes. However, the use of geospatial technologies and PSS have been quite limited in adoption and undertake by the planning profession. With the advent of Smart Cities renewed awareness and support of data driven approach and tools such as PSS have assisted in bridging this utilization gap. To improve the adoption of PSS in spatial planning, many researchers have emphasized the need for research into understandintg and documenting real world use cases in ofg PSS supported planning. This research documents the case study of Muzaffargarh as the first spatial planning practice in the country’s context where the Online WhatIf? PSS has been synchronized in the plan preparation process and used for the development of planning proposals. While documenting the detailsabout the employment of OWI in the preparation of peri-urban structure plan (PUSP), it captures the processes, opportunities and challenges along with the user feedback. The country context specific procedural details covering the datasets, planning factors and assumptions have been comprehensively explained. It has been ensured that the details are sufficient enough to act as a guide for future plan preparation tasks of similar nature. Similarly, challenges and opportunities have been documented as part of the lessons learnt. This research concludes that the Online WhatIf? (OWI) has demonstrated to be a very good fit in PUSP preparation. This PSS has shown to provide a consistent and structured process to interactively explore, future land development options, which is considered a useful approach in PUSP preparation
