Unveiling Urban Void Potential

Rapid urbanization, fragmented planning processes, unplanned peri-urban areas, inter-authoritative issues, erratic funding allocation, land speculation etc. posed serious challenges that substantially caused the generation of urban voids. Extensively, the unscientific, biased, and reactionary decision-making has instigated the need for a multi-layered assessment of urban voids. Several researchers addressed these concerns; however, they were limited in their qualitative understanding and inadequate to provide prioritization of urban voids for development. Hence, to address the challenging concern of decision-making, the present study put forth a scrupulous city section (zone) level hybrid investigation of urban voids by considering the Akurdi zone in PCMC (Pimpri-Chinchwad Municipal Corporation), India as a case. The groundwork recognized the imperative need for an ‘Inventory’ aiding the holistic and deeper assessment of urban voids. Further, using this inventory as a foundation, a multi-layered analysis was performed utilizing primary survey techniques. This unravelled the inherent development potential of urban voids in the form of an ‘Urban Void Analysis Index’ (UVAI) leading to their prioritization. This index has been derived by employing the hybrid MCDM methods mainly the AHP for weightage combined individually with TOPSIS, MOORA, and VIKOR methods. Ultimately, the comparative correlation of all hybrid methods yielded uniform prioritization results proving the robustness of the methodology. Cumulatively, this unbiased, scientific, and structured framework can guide decision-makers in an appropriate allocation of available resources with reliability and precision aiding in reviving such valuable public land assets.