Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5

GIS in Physical Planning

GIS based road and school location east of Lund City Practical Exercise

Introduction
Lund city, situated in the county of Skania in the south of Sweden, has a population of about
115000 people. Many students come to Lund to study since there are a lot of Universities since
1666. The demand on house, hence theirs cost, is drastically rising due to growth of population
in the city. Thus, many families find cheaper houses on the eastern part of the region. The
consequence is that Sdra Sandby, Dalby, Staffanstorp and Eslv are facing the increasing of
the houses demand. Thereby, the municipalities have decided to plan and construct a new
road in order to help the traffic from the Eastern part to Lund and then to Malm.
Furthermore, Lund Municipality has decided to build new school for this area for pupils
between 7 and 12 years. Thus, it is important to study the right location to satisfy the
increasing school demand due to the higher number of families in this area. Besides, the
planners consider as important factor the possibility for children to reach the school by biking
or walking this with the prospective to avoid the need of busses.

Aim
A) Planning of a road corridor passing through the areas just east of Lund
B) Localization of a school in the same area based on population distribution

Methods
Part A)
From the beginning, in order to accomplish the data organization, it was necessary to set the
environment to geo-process the files for the study area in ArcMap.
All the data have been converted in Raster and projected with RT90 according to the following
details:
Projection
Unit
Spheroid
Central Meridian
Reference Latitude
Scale Factor
False easing
False northing

Transverse mercator
Meters
Bessel 1841
15.80827778 E
0
1.0
1500 000
0.0

Before converting to raster, the features BB_2c5i and BB_2c6i were merged as well the
NP_2c5i and NP_2c6i. These last were also digitized with the aim to create feasible polygons
for the final analysis.
1

Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5

A particular operation was necessary to extract the quarry from Land Use shape file.
The reclassification of the created rasters was the following step.
In detail, the DEM raster was fixed to attain the right elevation about the sea level by
multiplying the DEM value with 8.59375. Then, the slope in percent computation was executed
with the tool of Spatial Analyst to get a slope raster with a grid size of 25. The values assigned
to the slope percent was 1 for slope percent between 0-3 and 3 for those higher than 3.
The next reclassified raster was the Soil type. This was reclassified by changing the value
according to the following table:
Soil type
Rock
Landfill
Glacifluvium
Clay
Morain
Clay-Morain
Organic soils
Sand
Silt
Water

Cost
7
2
1
7
1
3
7
3
3
10

The merged raster of BB_2c5i and BB_2c6i was given value 5.

The Land use was reclassified by using the table as follows with the exclusion of the quarry
with value 11 :
Value
2
3
5
7
11
12
14
15
18
19
30
31
32
40
44
45
48
54
55
72
81

Class
Small town, <200 inhabitants
Small town, > 200 inhabitants
Country houses/houses with open grounds
Road and railroad with surrounding areas
Area for mineral extraction
Waste area
Urban green area
Sports area
Golf course
Park- non urban area
Farm land
Fruit trees
Grassland
Deciduous forest
Coniferous forest
Coniferous forest
Mixed forest
Clearing
Young forest
Swamp
Water

Cost
9
10
6
4
10
7
5
6
2
5
3
7
3
7
5
5
5
2
2
5
10

The raster Historical (HI_2C5I) was reclassified by using a scale from 1 to 10 within the tool
distance in Spatial analyst.
The raster of the quarry Hardebarga was created by assigned 1 to the polygon and zero to the
no-data values.
At the end, the Natural Park raster was classified into two classes named Natural parks and
Natural reserves.
The result of this reclassification made possible the generation of Rasters to use as cost maps
for all the different layers shown in the figure below:
2

Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5

Land Use

Houses

Historic

Quarry

Slope

National Park

Soil type

The next step was to create a unique weighted raster from each different cost map with the
aim to calculate the costs for the road construction across the area. The operation was
computed in Raster Calculator by using the following formula and the weights in the table
below and on the right there is the figure with the result of the combination:
("Lu_reclass"*0.25)+("Hardebarga"*0.20)+("Builtup_area_reclass"*0.15)+("Protected_rec"
*0.10)+("Historical_rec"*0.10)+("Soil_type_rec"*0.15)+("Slope_rec"*0.15)
Raster data set
Slope
Soil type
Land use
Built up areas (not
included in LU)
Hardeberga Quarry
Historical Sites
National parks and
nature reserves

Influence
0.05
0.15
0.25
0.15
0.20
0.10
0.10

Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5

In conclusion, two shape files with start (X= 1341345, Y= 6175200) and destination (X=
1343100,Y= 6183900) points were created. With the start point layer and Weighted raster cost
were used to calculate Distance Cost that gave the least coast from the start point and Back
link necessary to compute the map of the least costs directions.
Distance Cost and Back link together with Destination point layer was used to calculate the
final road by using the arc tool Cost path.

Part B)
Children estimation in Eastern Lund
This part was analyzed by using statistical data from the Swedish National institute of
Statistics. The population of children between 7 and 12 years in Lund Municipality was taken
for the year 2013. The total population in Lund was 114291 and the total of children in the age
between 7 and 12 years was 7344 obtained as follows in the table below:
Age
7 years
8 years
9 years
10 years
11 years
12 years
tot

2013
1350
1249
1241
1209
1220
1075
7344

The given shape file with population distribution in the

study area was used to estimate the percentage of
pupils in this area as follows in the calculation sheet
below.

Percent of children Children in Eastern

Tot. Pop Eastern area Calculation
East Lund
Lund
1458
22682 ( 0,0643*22682)
6,43
(1457/22682)
Percent of children
Tot. Pop. Lund
Calculation
Lund
114291 (7344/114291)
6,43
Calculation of Gravity center
Then, the gravity center was calculated by using the population estimated for each point. This
was calculated for each point on the border of the polygon formed by the shape file rand_pop
by multiplying the the percert of children of East Lund with each cell containing the original
total population of Lund. The points necessary to compute the gravity centers were extracted
from the mask created as polyline (See figure below)

Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5
Then, the Gravity Center was calculated by using the
population estimated for each point. This was calculated for
each point on the border of the polygon formed by the
shape file rand_pop by multiplying the the percert of
children of East Lund with each cell containing the original
total population of Lund. The points necessary to compute
the gravity centers were extracted from the mask created as
polyline (See figure on the right).

Estimation of the meters by

going with bicycle and by foot.
km/h
bycycle
walking

m/10 min
10
1700
5
830

To accomplish the calculation of the Gravity Center, all the coordinates from the extracted points on
the polyline were weighted by multiply them with the number of pupils for each cell (See figure
below).

Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5

Results
The figure 1 shows the result from the analysis of least cost distance path for the new road
within the Eastern area of Lund Municipality in relation of every weighted factor. The figure 2
represents the gravity point where the school should be located and the distance from it by
walking with a velocity of 5 km/h (yellow circle) or by biking with a velocity of 10 km/h (orange
color circle).

Figure 1 New Road location on Eastern Lund Municipality

Gianni Gorgoglione

Physical Planning GISN14

Exercise 5

Figure 2 School location

Discussion
The identification of the least cost corridor through the Eastern area of Lund has been wisely
weighted according to the classified costs for the different features. In fact, the Cost Path tool
strives to identify those cells with lowest cost and at the same time tries to keep as good as possible
its relation to the distance between the start and destination points. The first question, here, is that if
we could avoid to use as criterion the shortest distance and try to maintain pure costs criteria with
the view to get the absolute possible least cost.
The Multi Criteria Evaluation (MCE) with weighed criteria is an acceptable method to help planners in
making decisions. Besides, the MCE looks work better in combination of GIS tools. But of course this
is just speculation and other methods could be proved and compared.
The school location part is a good representation of how to combine GIS and geo-statistical methods
that in this case the Centre Gravity was computed to obtain the best location for the school in
relationship with the number of pupils. The result shows clearly that where clusters of population are
consistent the center of gravity is located closer to these. Logically, this is what one could expect
from this analysis. If there is some kind of error in the positioning of the Center Gravity point, it might
depend from the estimation method used to get the number of children in the Eastern area of Lund.
In conclusion, the school location seems to be well distributed according to the dispersion of the
population.
7