GIS in Sustainable Urban Planning and Management: A Global Perspective

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.tandfebooks.com/doi/view/10.1201/9781315146638, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.

GIS is used today to better understand and solve urban problems. GIS in Sustainable Urban Planning and Management: A Global Perspective, explores and illustrates the capacity that geo-information and GIS have to inform practitioners and other participants in the processes of the planning and management of urban regions. The first part of the book addresses the concept of sustainable urban development, its different frameworks, the many ways of measuring sustainability, and its value in the urban policy arena. The second part discusses how urban planning can shape our cities, examines various spatial configurations of cities, the spread of activities, and the demands placed on different functions to achieve strategic objective. It further focuses on the recognition that urban dwellers are increasingly under threat from natural hazards and climate change.

Written by authors with expertise on the applications of geo-information in urban management, this book showcases the importance of GIS in better understanding current urban challenges and provides new insights on how to apply GIS in urban planning. It illustrates through real world cases the use of GIS in analyzing and evaluating the position of disadvantaged groups and areas in cities and provides clear examples of applied GIS in urban sustainability and urban resilience.

The idea of sustainable development is still very much central in the new development agenda of the United Nations, and in that sense, it is of particular importance for students from both the Global South and Global North. Professionals, researchers, and students alike will find this book to be an invaluable resource for understanding and solving problems relating to sustainable urban planning and management.

Martin van Maarseveen is a full professor in Management of Urban-Regional Dynamics and Head of the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management at ITC, University of Twente, The Netherlands. He obtained an MSc degree with distinction in Applied Mathematics in 1976, and a PhD degree in Stochastic Systems and Control Theory in 1982, both at the University of Twente. From 1980 till 1989 he was a senior researcher in transport planning and traffic management at TNO, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research, in Delft. In 1989 he returned to the University of Twente to become one of the founding fathers of the School for Civil Engineering & Management and Head of the Centre for Transport Studies. From 1995 till 2008 he was a full professor in Strategic Transport Planning and Sustainable Development. Since 2003 he is also a guest lecturer in Transport Planning, Modelling and Assessment at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. In his current position he focuses on the application of Geo-Information Science in the field of Urban Planning and Management in education, research and projects. He has a vast experience in international projects all around the globe, and is author of more than 200 scientific and professional publications.

Javier Martinez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management at ITC, University of Twente, the Netherlands. He graduated as an architect from the Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Design (UNR) Rosario, Argentina and obtained his MSc degree in geo-information for urban planning from ITC, University of Twente. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Geographical Sciences, Utrecht University. Between 1999 and 2001, he worked Argentina in the Strategic Plan Rosario office (PER) designing its Urban Indicators System. He has published research papers and book chapters in the application of GIS and indicators for policy making, urban poverty, quality-of-life and intra-urban inequalities. From 2010-until November 2014 he was Co-Coordinator of the Network-Association of European Researchers on Urbanization in the South (N-AERUS). Since 2017, he is member of the board of directors of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies (ISQOLS).

Johannes Flacke holds a Diploma degree in Geography (1994) from Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany. He received his PhD in Geosciences at the Ruhr-University Bochum in 2002 with a dissertation on information systems promoting sustainable land use based on spatial indicators. Before joining ITC at the University of Twente as Assistant Professor Spatial Planning and Decision Support Systems in 2007 he worked as a postdoc researcher at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, TU Dortmund University. He has over 20 years of theoretical and practical experience in urban and regional planning in the global north and south and the development and use of geo-information and planning support systems. Fields of application have been urban land use planning, informal settlements, health and environmental inequalities, sustainable land management, climate change adaptation, hazard and risk management, and poverty alleviation and targeting. His research focuses on the transformation of urban areas into sustainable and resilient places for all. Main research interests are currently informed spatial decision making for urban planning in the global south, climate change adaptation planning at the local level, the application of collaborative spatial decision support systems in urban planning and micro-level modelling of urban dynamics.