Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
contributions. Finally, the involvement of local partners or the international
opening through an increasingly shared regulatory and planning power can thus be
enhanced.
GIS tools are well-established in the field of urban and regional planning to
improve the efficiency of planning and management processes. Today, a growing
number of communities employ them to test—with increasingly widespread and
interesting results, e-governance practices, which is the innovation of community
services not only to provide a greater efficiency, but to increase urban rights, as
new interface of the relationship between city and community, a planning method
based on extended participation in the emerging forms of active citizenship and,
finally, on the balance between cognitive opportunities offered by collaborative
urban mapping. The spreading and integration of Web/GIS platforms in the public
administrations and the popularity of Open Data not only contributes to improve
the interpretation of resources and their better management, but encourages the
establishment of a network of cities aimed at promoting local development, the
enhancement of community and businesses services, by strengthening ties with
networks of cities at international level. In addition, the cross-platform sharing of
land use knowledge increases opportunities for new working activities, meaning
opening up new spaces for higher education, lifelong learning and for the repo-
sitioning of broad professional categories of workers, especially young.
The development and spreading of new technologies in the field of urban and
regional planning shall lead to the experimentation of new interfaces: represen-
tation and communication methods enhancing traditional systems to extend the
application of geodata within the planning process. In this way, the planning
process would change through new modalities to read and understand macro
regions, strategic platforms, local systems and on-going socio-economic relations,
revealing concealed links which would lead to a non-institutional redefinition of
territorial aggregations.
The experimentation, carried out in several local realities, of GIS network
projects, aimed at promoting networking of cities, is included within the broader
challenge of promoting cloud governance as a new dimension of local develop-
ment. Community is the sphere of ICT integration into urban policies where the
communicative potential is best expressed, and added value is ensured, namely the
combination of actors who, out of a common interest, interact within networks by
carrying out transactions and exchanges, reporting problems and sharing solutions,
developing projects and promoting actions aimed at increasing the added value.
Land management as a system of interconnected sensors, together with interfaces
and City Apps, for example, can encourage the setting up of virtual districts (in the
fields of production, tourism, food, culture) based on cloud computing dedicated to
SMEs with the goal of restoring the local system's competitive advantages,
stimulating the region's integrated development by linking businesses with other
global enterprises networks. The local districts philosophy will lead city networks
to compete in the global market as local network systems, employing three
important competitive resources: geolocalised information, digital connections and
citizen networks.
