Building a GIS Platform for Sustainable Land Management: A Case Study of the City of ?a?ak,Serbia

The general aim of this research is to contribute to sustainable land management and urban planning practices. An approach for building an urban planning-oriented information platform that could support a sustainable (i.e. environmentally sustainable), socially responsible and economically efficient decision-making process in the future at the municipal level is proposed. The proposed information platform approach relies on and is built for the Geographic Information System (GIS) but includes basic data management principles and the standards of the Spatial Data Information (SDI) concept, namely, INSPIRE. Thus, a model with the two following technical elements for building land management and urban planning based on a general platform or database is proposed in this article: (1) a conceptual Unified Modeling Language (UML) data model for urban planning metadata and data for different types of urban plans and (2) lists of land-use classes and types at the municipal level (included in the UML data model). The proposed approach includes a land-use model and the standardization of urban planning data to build a GIS platform to better integrate various types of data (social, economic, environmental, etc.) and is based on general and detailed urban regulation plans and land governance practices in the City of ?a?ak, Republic of Serbia. Once implemented, the proposed approach is expected to create preconditions for decision making regarding future sustainable land development in ?a?ak and other municipalities in Serbia.