PLANNING FOR OPTIMUM USE OF PUBLIC LAND IN AHMEDABAD

Abstract

With an avid interest of the urban land management and the process of provisioning of the infrastructure amenities of a city and their aspects, I set out to understand the importance of how the unutilized vacant lands in the city could be managed and how to cope the lacking infrastructure amenities of the area of the city. These two problems could be benefited from one another. The vacant lands of the city could be used to cater the lacking infrastructure needs of the city. The case in hand is that of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. Here the area level planning is done through Town Planning Schemes (TPS) that uses the method of Plot Reconstitution for developing an area. Each TPS has earmarked plots that are specifically reserved for the area level social infrastructure and amenities. The prime focus of the study was to manage the vacant public land that are earmarked as reserved lands in the TP Schemes, by providing the lacking infrastructure facilities. The dissertation has detailed analysis of the land management, vacant lands, and infrastructure amenities of the city. Then specific area of the city was selected for the further detailed study. It was thoroughly documented, various spatial datasets of the study area were prepared for the spatial analysis on GIS platform. Structured interviews along with opinion survey was done from various stakeholders of the study area. The dissertation provides policy planning guidelines from the inferences of the aforesaid analysis conducted by the author. For the accommodating lacking infrastructure in the vacant lands, the study has adopted Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique of the Mutli Criteria Decision Analysis. AHP analyses various criteria together for providing the most suitable location of the various infrastructure and amenities in the study area. The study has demonstrated the locational suitability of educational infrastructure of the study area, by overlapping all the various criteria together