Abstract
Urban visual pollution is increasingly affecting the built-up areas of the rapidly urbanizing planet. Outdoor advertisements are the key visual pollution objects affecting the visual pollution index and revenue generation potential of a place. Current practices of uninformed and uncontrolled outdoor advertising (especially billboards) impairs effective control of visual pollution in developing countries. Improving this can result in over 20% reduction of visual pollution. This article presents a spatial decision support system (SDSS) to facilitate all the stakeholders (development control authorities, advertisers, billboard owners, and the public) in balancing the optimal positioning of billboards under the governing regulations. In terms of its technical implementation, SDSS is based on well-known geospatial open source technologies and uses an analytical hierarchy process AHP-inspired approach in spatial decision-making. It can help users through its category-specific user interface to identify potential sites to position new billboards and the selection of boards from existing sites based on a wide variety of characteristics. The observations of all stakeholders have been recorded through panel feedback to assess the system’s initial effectiveness. The proposed system has been found functional in identifying hot spots for the focused management and exploration of the best suitable sites for new billboards. So, it helps the advertising agencies, urban authorities, and city councils in better planning and management of existing billboard locations to optimize revenue and improve urban aesthetics. The system can be replicated in other countries irrespective of spatial boundaries by incorporating jurisdictional rules and regulations.
Highlights
Rapid urbanization has affected visual pollution, deteriorating the quality of life in urban centres
Wakil et al have labelled the “pollutants” as “Visual Pollution Objects (VPOs)” to refer to all kinds of manmade features along with their physical characteristics that affect the visual quality of urban surroundings [5]
Wakil et al have identified thirty-nine VPOs and ranked them based on contribution to the Visual Pollution Index (VPI), which is a scale of measuring visual pollution at a given node
Summary
Rapid urbanization has affected visual pollution, deteriorating the quality of life in urban centres. Wakil et al estimate that outdoor advertisements and billboards contribute to 20.6% of the spatial visual pollution in a typical urban setting of a developing country. Advertisers need to identify sites offering good exposure to a maximum audience in relevant communities This is important to highlight that the intended stakeholders such as the advertisement agencies (more precisely “media communication groups” or “media houses”) and controlling authorities (urban planners) have different objectives and competing requirements in out of home media management which has not been previously managed through a single interface spatial decision support system (SDSS). This study develops an SDSS which supports relevant stakeholders in their decisions by providing actionable information It could help manage and control billboards such that maximum financial potential within the regulatory limitations can be exploited. The SDSS aims to (a) assist government bodies in regulating the location of billboards by maintaining linear density, size, and height of installations in the light of relevant regulations; (b) assist billboard owners in selecting optimal sites for the installation of new billboards and hoardings; (c) help advertisers in selecting suitable sites for an advertisement campaign based on the billboard site characteristics and neighborhood demographics
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