WEB-BASED GIS DATABASE, BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

The city of Brussels has developed three main activities to find out abandoned and unoccupied buildings for a systematic inventory of vacant buildings. The database assembles relevant information about these buildings and provides a geographic overview to support the city administration to define a territorial approach.

Mapping

The city of Brussels does following activities to find out and map abandoned and unoccupied buildings:

1. Field survey, estimating vacancy through a visual assessment from the public space;
2. Asking water & electricity companies which buildings have a low consumption of water and electricity;
3. A check of the population register by the demographic department to know if there is a domiciliation in the building.

Decision-making

Having identified abandoned and unoccupied buildings and sites, they are centralised and mapped in a web-based GIS database. In this database all available information within the public administrations about these buildings and sites are collected, supporting to take decision how to handle the building (i.e. potential building permits or applications-applied taxes-measures of security or prohibition of occupation-legal actions and affectations). The web database is accessible for all users who work on unoccupied buildings issues.