Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
But the local budget plan is not only the most important, but also one of the most
complex decisions in local politics. The complexity of information leads to the fact
that city councilors themselves call it incomprehensible. By now, the information of
the local budget plan is only presented by the means of tables. The author suggests
to use maps as visualization tool for the local budget plan, as maps can summarize
the content of a local budget plan and, at the same time explicitly show its spatial
impact. One of the hypothesis of this study, generated from the idea that the main
interest of local stakeholders should be to control the spatial development of their
city,
is that
the spatial impact
is a relevant decision criterion for local city
councilors.
Also Wermker and Heil (
2003
, p. 257), dealing with social inequality in cities,
see the necessity to find spatial organization schemes for local budgets. The authors
argue that the administrative reform in Germany
s local authorities has to be
complemented by a spatial dimension, in order to be able to achieve positive
developments in poor neighbourhoods. Already in the 1980s, economic scientists
deal with the spatial efficiency of public finances (Junkernheinrich and Klemmer
1985
). They analysed the labour market areas in North Rhine-Westphalia. Having a
look at the local scale, approaches of mapping budgets exist in the participatory
budget Berlin-Lichtenberg (Bezirksamt Lichtenberg von Berlin
2006
). There, gen-
eral acceptance of the relevance of the spatial dimension to budget decisions led to
first examples of a spatial repartition of the local budget, presented by the means of
pie charts. But a completely georeferenced local budget is still missing.
Within the process of establishing a local budget plan, there are several steps
which follow the same scheme every year, as they result from administrative rules.
The major makes a draft of a local budget plan and presents it to the city council.
Then, the city councilors as well as the citizens discuss the draft and try to make
changes. Finally, the city council has to decide about the local budget plan, and the
approving authority has to agree to the content. All of these steps can be combined
with cartographic action fields, as described by Bollmann (
2001a
). Especially, two
of the mentioned action fields can be of relevance within the process of establishing
a local budget plan: communication (e.g., when the major presents the content of
his draft) and data exploration (e.g., when the city councilors and citizens want to
see the spatial impact of certain changes in the draft). Within the research project,
both action fields have been taken into account more detailed; finally, they have
been divided in even smaller parts of cartographic activity (see Bollmann
2001b
).
Namely, these are the common cognitive tasks when regarding a map: searching
patterns, comparing values of different areas, searching for specific values, and
so on.
In order to study the use of maps within the process of establishing the local
budget plan, the investments contained in a local budget plan first have to be
georeferenced. The aim of the study is then to isolate influence factors of map
use within the cartographic action fields.
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