471 International Journal on Advances in Software, vol 4 no 3 & 4, year 2011, http://www.iariajournals.org/software/ 2011, © Copyright by authors, Published under agreement with IARIA - www.iaria.org Models of 40-Year Spatial Development of Cities in the Czech Republic in a geographic information system Lena Halounová, Karel Vepřek, Martin Řehák Dept. of Mapping and Cartography Faculty of Civil Engineering, CTU in Prague Prague, Czech Republic e-mail: lena.halounova@fsv.cvut.cz arch.veprek@tiscali.cz martin.rehak.1@fsv.cvut.cz Abstract—There are many indicators of sustainable development of towns defined by urban specialists, sociologists, economists, etc. The paper presents the first part of a project whose goal is to find indicators of harmonic development of towns based on analysis of forty years development of fifty Czech towns. The indicators are studied in land use spatial changes, demography and road traffic intensity changes. First ten towns were processed for the period between 1970 and 2009 being mapped in general urban land use classes and related to the measured road density. City land use class areas were derived from combination of actual and historical city plans and remote sensing data using geographic information system tools. It was found that the traffic intensity within towns and to and from towns is more dependent on existence of close highways and by-pass roads unlike number of inhabitants, e.g. Political changes from the communist regime to the democratic one was also an important breakpoint in the city developments. Increase of the road traffic intensity and enlarging of residential areas are features proving the fact. The paper presents a methodology of spatial mapping of land use classes utilized for determination of town development. The city developments and their relation to road traffic are documented on maps and graphs. Keywords-GIS; remote sensing data; city plan; number of inhabitants; urban model; land use; road traffic intensity I. INTRODUCTION The development of cities during last decades has faced us with a new situation. Most inhabitants in many European countries are concentrated in large towns. One fifth of the Czech Republic population is living in three largest towns – Prague, Brno and Ostrava. Fig. 1 shows percentage of inhabitants of all analyzed cities compared to two largest cities of the country- Prague and Brno - forming nearly half of inhabitants; therefore, the results of the analysis can be regarded as really representative. Present state of the balance among consumption level of society and quality of life is a matter of scientific papers, research [2][5][6], many projects [1][7], and political and economical discussions in many countries. Life quality is directly related to a lot of environmental and socio- economic conditions. These conditions determine a harmonic development which should be based on equivalent and adequate demands of the human society. To define “adequate” means to take into account both consumption, and quality of life. Both are closely connected to the road traffic and its intensity. Figure 1. Development of percentage of inhabitants of analyzed cities in the framework of the Czech Republic The Department of Mapping and Cartography has been processing a COST project focused on a detailed evaluation of relations between the quality of life and present behavior of the human society. The project goal is to create a model allowing improving the present development status in urban areas being less demanding and ensuring their sustainable development. The project is a logical continuation of several projects performed by specialists from the Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague in the Czech Republic and the State Institute for Regional Planning who have collected and summarized large data volume of fifty towns (including three largest ones - Prague, Brno and Ostrava) on: 1. Functional typology comprising five general land use classes: housing and infrastructure areas summarized into a residential one, industrial and agricultural production areas named areas of production, areas of traffic, areas of recreation including sport and green vegetation land, surface water areas, etc., and areas of other functions like arable land, orchards, meadows, technical infrastructure – waste water treatment plant areas, quarries, e.g., this classification is used by urban planners and the individual city land use maps utilize its list. 2. The second group of land use has been collected and recorded by the Czech Office for Surveying,