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• > Sustainable Urban Atlas

Sustainable Urban Atlas

CC by Gunnar Ries

Urban planning provides one of the most technically demanding applications of the HUMBOLDT Framework and yet successful application offers great rewards in terms of policy impact. At the local level, horizontal integration across the sectoral boundaries of the policy themes allied with vertical integration between the levels of governance, i.e. Europe, Member States, regional and local levels, presents a myriad of harmonisation challenges. Sustainable Urban Atlas scenario is an attempt to mitigate these challenges providing the key to unlock the prime concerns of the policy end user to secure integrated intelligence that is central to effective decision-making and policy integration.

As a first step a case study of the Urban Atlas at local level, city of Vitoria-Gasteiz is selected which is actively operating an Environmental Information System (SI@M) since 1990. The aims of this system include supporting decision-taking and policy evaluation and enhancing public access to environmental information. The system is based on the principle that decision-taking is a shared responsibility that requires the sharing of knowledge between citizens, planners and political representatives. In general, the SI@M is conceived as an instrument to facilitate the environmental management of the city. However, SI@M lacks interoperability in terms of adapting new standardised geoservices and metadata standards.

The Sustainable Urban Atlas application is intended to transform the existing system of SI@M towards open, harmonized and standardized system in order to be compatible with other European SDIs. In general, the handling of data (spatial and non-spatial) for the above task is characterized based on the new user requirements acquired from Vitoria-Gasteiz and the Sustainable Urban Atlas scenario offers added value for the intended use cases as follows:

1. Transforming existing metadata to INSPIRE and Spanish Metadata Profile - NEM (Núcleo Español de Metadatos) compliant service with added functionality to manage and browse the metadata catalogue. This includes both spatial and non-spatial data for the Sustainability Observatory of Vitoria-Gasteiz.
2. To monitor and evaluate the Sustainable Mobility and Public Space Plan of Vitoria-Gasteiz based on the calculations performed on previously identified indicators and INSPIRE compliant transport model. This monitoring enables end users to visualise specific information based on the data acquired from various data sources in the city.
3. Maintain existing data and achieve added interoperability with other INSPIRE compliant information systems.


Source: Asier Sarasua, SI@M - Environmental Studies Centre (CEA), Vitoria-Gasteiz.