Compare methods

	Multi-Criteria Site Selection	Land Value Capture Analysis
Field	Urban Studies	Urban Studies
Family	MCDM	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2006	2006
Originator	Jacek Malczewski (GIS-MCDA synthesis); Thomas Saaty (AHP weighting)	Jeffery J. Smith & Thomas A. Gihring (value-capture synthesis)
Type	Spatial multi-criteria decision analysis for siting facilities or land uses	Estimation of land/property value uplift attributable to public investment for value capture
Seminal source	Malczewski, J. (2006). GIS-based multicriteria decision analysis: a survey of the literature. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 20(7), 703–726.	Smith, J. J., & Gihring, T. A. (2006). Financing transit systems through value capture: An annotated bibliography. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 65(3), 751–786.
Aliases	GIS-MCDA, Weighted Overlay Suitability, AHP Site Suitability, Spatial Multi-Criteria Evaluation	Value Capture Analysis, Land Value Uplift Estimation, Betterment Value Analysis, Transit Value Uplift Analysis
Related	4	4
Summary	Multi-criteria site selection combines multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) with geographic information systems to choose where to locate a facility or land use when many, often conflicting, spatial criteria matter at once. Synthesized as GIS-based MCDA by Jacek Malczewski, it standardizes each criterion layer to a common scale, assigns the criteria importance weights — frequently via Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process — and combines them through weighted overlay to produce a suitability surface that ranks every candidate location. The method makes an inherently messy, value-laden siting decision explicit, reproducible, and auditable.	Land value capture analysis measures the increase in land and property values that a public investment — a new transit line, station, park, or rezoning — creates, so that some of that windfall can be recovered to help pay for the investment. Grounded in classical economics and synthesized for transit by Smith and Gihring, it isolates the value uplift attributable to the public action, usually with hedonic price models and quasi-experimental before/after comparisons, and then quantifies how large a capturable surplus exists. The logic is one of fairness and finance: when public spending lifts private land values, recovering part of the gain funds the public good that created it.