PBRS II - Area Based

The area based PBRS applies the philosophy and ethos of the PBRS across wider geographic areas, bringing together social, economic and environmental attributes using geographic "grids" on a GIS platform. Here, the emphasis is on highlighting where there is greatest relative need or opportunity by area - potential sites can be assessed against this to direct decision making towards those areas where need or opportunity is greatest and thus the potential benefits of redevelopment highest.

The area based PBRS has a landscape scale approach, and as such delivers more holistic results that when applied contribute to sustainable outcomes on the ground. Because of this wider focus, and more holistic illustration, stakeholders can form more quickly into effective working partnerships - enhanced by the fact that this PBRS approach is faster (and therefore less expensive) than the site based approach.

In an area-based PBRS, the basic GIS building blocks are "rasters", which are in effect square cells which represent a geographic area. These can range from sub-metre to several kilometres - the smaller the size of the square, the more defined the PBRS results at a local scale (although small sizes require more powerful IT resources, and can be very time intensive in terms of processing speed). Each grid cell is allocated a score for each specific attribute, and by overlaying grids from a number of attributes various themes can be combined.

This grid system also allows a theoretical social, economic and environmental terrain to be shown in 3D, to illustrate the depth of need and / or opportunity of an area.