Developing decision model and sustainable mapping to screen the efficiency of brownfield redevelopment based on socioeconomic open data

Abstract

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United Nations in 2015, comprise 17 goals developed to balance social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Regional sustainable development can be considered an important part of investment to redevelop brownfields. With breakthroughs in information technology, Taiwan has established a number of open databases. This study uses open datasets of regional socioeconomic and environmental geo-information to develop a regional SDG map and screen suitable brownfield locations for redevelopment. In addition, this study has designed a Brownfield Redevelopment Query model that combines socioeconomic geographic information obtained from big data with sustainable potentiality for evaluating benefit-cost ratios (BCRs). Land stakeholders can obtain useful information prior to brownfield investment. The flexible user interface is useful for exploring the outcomes of the BCRs (consolidation, internalities, and externalities) for four land-use scenarios (residential, industrial, commercial, and other and public land with renewable energy facilities) of brownfield redevelopment. The brownfield redevelopment BCR is positively dominated by operating profits in the reuse stage for two sites. In addition, the externalities BCR value of the studied cases is positive, particularly in converting the residential land if the site is located at Level 4 or Level 5 of the SDG map. Consequently, this study uses a large quantity of transparent information and a flexible user interface to develop a useful evaluation tool and reduce the possible pitfalls associated with brownfield redevelopment for land stakeholders.