European Land Use Spatial Data Sources and Their Role in Integrated Planning: Opportunities and Challenges for Poland

Beata Stelmach-Fita

doi:10.3390/land10111138

Abstract

One of the 34 themes of the spatial datasets of Directive 2007/2/EC INSPIRE is ‘land use’, rightly described independently of ‘land cover’. Laws in most countries, apart from the Netherlands, do not consider the electronic form of plans as a legally binding document. As far as the elaboration step and the adoption step are concerned, the main land use requirement is related to the datasets that describe existing land use at present and in the past. Surveys and case studies concern Poland and were carried out in two stages, I in 2011–2013 and II in 2017–2019. Previous research on this subject concerned ‘planned land use’, especially attempts to standardize the classification of sub-local zoning plans and omit the creation of a metadata profile for existing land use. The main goal of the qualitative research is to assess the completeness of the available spatial datasets of existing and planned land use, conditioned by the needs of users. The author recommends the establishment in Poland of a new type of regulatory ‘Land Use Plan’ for the area of an entire municipality. As a summary, the author’s model of ‘The spatial planning system in the integrated development system of Poland’ was presented.

Highlights

Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 (INSPIRE) established the Community Infrastructure for Spatial Information
The land use theme is itself split into two different types: existing land use (ELU), which objectively depicts the use and functions of a territory as it has been and effectively still is in real life, and planned land use (PLU), which corresponds to spatial plans, defined by spatial planning authorities, depicting the possible utilization of the land in the future
The theoretical background concerns the first and second stage of research, in which it was assumed that spatial planning is a special case of management and not an activity undertaken during management

Summary

Introduction

Directive 2007/2/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 14 March 2007 (INSPIRE) established the Community Infrastructure for Spatial Information. The JRC Report, “A conceptual model for developing interoperability specifications and harmonization of spatial datasets” [3], deals with the search for solutions for the interoperability and harmonization of spatial datasets related to the 34 INSPIRE themes. One of these themes is land use (Land Cover is a separate topic), defined in the Directive as territory characterized according to its current and future planned functional dimension or socio-economic purpose (e.g., residential, industrial, commercial, agricultural, forestry, or recreational). Two types of classification systems are supported by the land use theme, the (obligatory) Hierarchical INSPIRE land use Classification System (HILUCS), which is a multi-level, classification system that will apply to the existing and planned land use, and the (optional) specific classification system in use in a member state (D2.8.III. Data Specification on Land Use, available online: https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/id/document/tg/lu) (accessed on 20 July 2020)

Objectives

Results

Conclusion