Author ORCID Identifier
Lindsay Poirier: 0000-0001-9307-5834
Dexter Antonio: 0000-0001-7181-8270
Mirthala Lopez: 0000-0003-4853-0601
Ranesh Karma: 0009-0002-7607-0446
Asiya Natekal: 0000-0002-9485-1601
Catherine Brinkley: 0000-0002-3642-8207
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-1-2024
Publication Title
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
Publication Title
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science
Volume
51
Issue
8
Abstract
Local land-use plans help guide future development, but it is often difficult to compare content across jurisdictions, making regional coordination and plan evaluation challenging. This research reviews federal, state, and local data infrastructure guidance for land-use plans and compares such guidance to compliance with a California use-case. Findings indicate a number of obstacles to fostering data sharing and comparative analysis of plans: there is currently no central repository of land-use plans; plans are not uniform in format and are often out of date; many plans are not machine-readable thereby inhibiting text extraction, and planning language varies so greatly that there are numerous synonyms for terms of interest. Nonetheless, we demonstrate that the creation of digital platforms for archiving and searching across plans is currently feasible and enables large-scale quantitative analysis. Based on currently available metadata in existing land-use plans, we designed and piloted a structured database to enable users to search for terms and phrases across over 500 land-use plans. To center issues of social equity, the open access platform was developed in collaboration with state agencies and community organizations focused on environmental justice. Based on the pilot, we conclude with a framework for both developing plan data infrastructure given current constraints in standardized plan metadata and availability as well as guidance for plan formatting using FAIR standards (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).
First Page
1913
Last Page
1930
Recommended Citation
Poirier, Lindsay; Antonio, Dexter; Dettmann, Makenna; Eng, Tiffany; Ganata, Jennifer; Ghosh, Sujoy; Lopez, Mirthala; Karma, Ranesh; Natekal, Asiya; and Brinkley, Catherine, "Making Plans Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable with Data Infrastructure: A Search Engine for Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Planning Documents" (2024). Statistical and Data Sciences: Faculty Publications, Smith College, Northampton, MA.
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/sds_facpubs/82
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
10.1177/23998083241227471
Rights
© The Author(s) 2024
Comments
Archived as published.