SMT201 AY2019-20G2 EX2 Lek Jan Yee Lois

GIS Modelling for Urban Land Suitability Study

We are conducting a study to identify a suitable location for building a National Communicable Disease Quarantine Centre located at Gombak planning subzone. The site would need to have a contiguous area of at least 10,000m2 and meet the following criteria:

1) Economic factor: The site should avoid having steep slopes as that would require cutting and filling which would amount to a relatively higher development cost.
2) Accessibility factor: The site should be close to existing roads (service roads and tracks) for easy transportation of building materials
3) Health risk factor: The site should be away from the population as we would want to prevent the disease from spreading.
4) Natural conservation factor: The site should be away from forested land, water and parks.

Part 1: Map View with Study Area, Target Roads, Buildings, Natural Features, Digital Elevation

Layer	Description
Accessibility to Roads	The figure shows the map of the Gombak location. The results are filtered to show only service roads and tracks as other data included in the roads data taken from BBBike also includes other data such as cycling routes which would not be very useful in our analysis as we are looking at the most accessible location for the transportation of building materials during the construction stage. The other routes like cycling roads were classified under Other roads for reference.
Buildings	Data for the building layer was taken from BBBike. Based on the map, a suitable location for the quarantine centre could possibly be in the south of Gombak but away from the Hillview residential area. This is because the centre would need to be away from the population to prevent the spread of these diseases. There are also residential areas on the east side and therefore we would want to keep the centre away from that area.
Natural Features	The quarantine centre should be away from forested land, parks and water as we would want to preserve these natural elements. Based on the map, a suitable location could be in between the south and central areas of Gombak.
Digital Elevation	The Digital elevation map was taken from NASA's Earth Data Search Site. The areas in red would be optimal areas for the quarantine centre give the elevation of the area while the blue areas would be undesirable as it would incur high land development costs due to cutting and filling.

The data for this analysis was obtained from the Master Plan 2014 Subzone Boundary, BBBike Singapore (buildings, roads, nature) and ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (Elevation raster layer).

Part 2: Proximity Analysis

Part 3: Criteria Scores

Layer	Description
Standardised Proximity to Buildings	Example
Example	Example
Example	Example

Part 5: Land Suitability

Using the standardised results from part 3, I merged all four layers together by using the raster calculator. Each factor was multiplied by its respective AHP value to give weightage.

The range of results for the merged layer was from 0.207 to 0.867. To get an understanding of the optimal values, I standardised the results again and selected the region where it was more than equals to 85%.

References

1. Master Plan 2014 Subzone Boundary [[1]]
2. BBBike Singapore [[2]]