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Bringing the citizens closer to local government: The innovative GIS of the La Coruña Local Council


Jaume Royo Llobet
GIS Director
TAO-gedas
jaume.royo@tao.es

José Manuel Peña Penabad
Head of Planning, Budget and Management Control
La Coruña Local Council
jpena@aytolacoruna.es

ABSTRACT
One of the greatest challenges facing Local Government in the 21st century is keeping up with the demands of the citizens. This means local councils taking on efficient management of resources, planning and taking responsible decisions, and, above all, keeping the public up to date on information and opening the way to their participation. Until recently, for most Spanish local governments, cartography and geographical information systems (hereinafter GIS) seemed to have little to do with these issues. The question in political and managerial circles was always the same: why invest a good deal of money in cartography if in the end it will only be used by a handful of specialists, and so would affect neither the bulk of internal management nor relations with the general public. The failure of some emblematic projects helped to further marginalize cartography and GIS, pushing them to the edge of investments in the modernisation of local governments.

As a contrast to this biased view of cartography and GIS tools, are initiatives such as the corporative GIS set up a couple of years ago by the La Coruña Local Council. The GIS system in La Coruña is intended to become a true catalyst for a modern and efficient organisation that is close to the public. In the following lines we investigate the inherent difficulties of a project with these characteristics, the results of the same and the future challenges that La Coruña's GIS will have to face to keep the public informed and encourage them to participate in local management.

THE ORIGINS OF THE PROJECT
One of the strategic commitments adopted by La Coruña Council in 2003, was to put cartography on the map; that is to say put cartography to the forefront of local management. In theory this seemed straightforward; to design and implement a transverse information system that would allow the maintenance and use of cartography, and which would integrate progressively with the different processes and information flows from the different functional areas of the municipal council.

However, the GIS has to be built around an existing system. This meant a number of advantages, such as having qualified personnel within the organisation itself and a suitable technological infrastructure, as well as having an information database (local census, taxes, etc.) available which could be linked up to the cartography, giving it added value.

But the disadvantages largely outweighed the advantages, and significantly determined the strategy to be followed. Firstly, the cartographic information was spread out among different management areas, none of which guaranteed suitable maintenance of it. A wide cross section of cartographic sources, dates and scales were being used together, making it practically impossible to get an overall cartographic vision of the municipal territory. A second negative aspect was the complete lack of an organised territorial information flow within the organisation. There were isolated CAD and GIS user groups, but they did not communicate with one another and were generally quite reluctant to change. Lastly, the number of actual cartography users was very small, possibly due to the factors previously described, but also because of the inexistence of a clear overall strategy in terms of GIS.

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