Abstract:
Co-location involves the intentional siting together of public facilities. Co-location
of public facilities is becoming an increasingly common practice, particularly for
its perceived benefits of resource savings, increased efficiency and synergy of services,
and enhanced sense of community. Such advantages may be especially critical in a
location undergoing rapid growth. The ability to plan and manage the process of co-locating
public facilities can be very important to the successful, efficient growth of a
community. However, there can be significant challenges. Deliberate planning can be
problematic in an environment of rapid growth. Co-location may instead be left to
opportunity, which does little to maximize overall resource savings or to establish a
coherent, long-term policy of co-location. Modeling can also be problematic in a rapidly
changing environment. In general, modeling has proven to be limited in terms of serving
as a predictive siting tool for public facilities under real-world conditions. There are no
one-size-fits-all models for siting facilities, let alone for co-locating them, which is a far
more complex endeavor. Thus, a more sustainable approach might be to develop a
decision support tool. This research develops a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS)
to co-locate public facilities in Loudoun County, a rapidly growing county in northern
Virginia. The goal of the project is to determine if employing a SDSS based on
CommunityViz in ArcGIS 9.2 facilitates successful co-location of public facilities in a
dynamic decision-making environment.
