Geospatial strategic planning for Isfahan municipality

Abstract

Nowadays, globalization and rapid changes in developing countries affect the behavior and culture of people. Adapting to these changes is the vital means to remain in the competition of being a developed society. One of the most important changes is the relationship between humans and land which have evolved by way of many parameters such as globalization, urbanization, technological and economic reforms. In order to be able to adapt this changing relationship it is required to enable societies by developing new infrastructures and tools. Strategic planning is a key concept for effective and successful development of these infrastructures and tools which have to be considered by the governments and decision makers.

The municipality of Isfahan, a metropolitan city in the central part of the Iran, in 2006 established a strategic plan for spatial data and services infrastructure and its first revision and evaluation has been done in 2009. This paper describing the principals of spatial strategic planning in multi-unit organizations, such as municipalities, the results of establishing this strategic plan in Isfahan municipality is also presented. The geospatial strategic plan in this project had four stages including comparative studies, investigating high level related documents, developing visions and missions and designing GIS strategic plan using SWOT analysis.

In this study, major strategies and policies are proposed in the domains of Geospatial Businesses (GB), Geospatial Systems and Services (GSS), Geospatial Data (GD) and Geospatial Information Technology (GIT). In order to achieve the high level performance, different infrastructure components for enabling geospatial businesses, projects for geospatial enabling systems and services, projects for enabling geospatial data acquisition and different projects for enabling geospatial information technology are proposed.

Concentrating on spatial data and service infrastructures and capacity building, an evaluation of an ongoing plan has also been done to check the compliance of that with the new changes and conditions. The evaluation illustrates that the plan leads to better realizing spatially enabling Isfahan municipality to deliver better services to its citizens.