Assessment of Urban Wastelands using GIS and IoT as Tools for Spatial Data Analysis

Large urban development around cities often results in vacant, abandoned or unproductive land parcels, sometimes called ‘wastelands’. There are various types of urban vacant land identified as post-industrial, derelict, land without any vegetation and left unattended, natural, and transportation-related vacant lands. The traditional way of collecting the data to study and manage such massive wastelands is hugely time consuming. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Remote sensing applications can extract periodic spatial changes and make it easier to collect and generate base maps, assess the number of wastelands in a given city, and remotely assess the extent of the area of wastelands/ vacant/ degraded lands. GIS also helps as a valuable tool to identify the neighboring land uses, lakes, green cover, and road networks, which could be considered as base work for any study to progress further with accurate information. Newer technologies like big data and cloud-assisted technology are employed in IoT applications for these wastelands to formulate an intelligent environment. Factors such as workforce, time, labor, transportation, money, and all other logistics can thus be strategized better with the combination of GIS and IoT applications; these are integral to wasteland monitoring and management practices for urban regions. This review paper aims to demonstrate how GIS, remote sensing, and IoT facilitate us to carry out monitoring, analyze, extrapolate, process, store, and integrate the spatial data for urban wastelands; and becomes a basis for planning and decision-making for on-site and management plans.