Development of GIS in urban planning agencies in Serbia – experiences of town Planning Institute of Belgrade

Abstract

Transition reforming processes in Serbia during past two years created prosperous environment for very complex activities of numerous aid agencies. Owing to some of them the knowledge level about modern concepts and approaches in the field of strategic and urban development is significantly raised in big cities. Especially important was the impact and the effect of building governmental capacities action. During the last year on the highest governmental levels and in some prosperous local governments consciousness of ICT support importance in contemporary urban development management process is higher than ever. Now the problem is lack of capabilities for defining of comprehensive and coordinated action plan, which will initiate the development of primary ICT tools on a city level. On the other hand a large number of local planning agencies started with their own reorganization trying to increase efficiency and effectiveness, and most often they recognized an ICT support as a right way to do it. In many cases local GIS is initiated and basically performed by the planning agency without of local government initial support, but soon after had a acceleration role in further institutional ICT development. In a first place, this paper will provide the oversight of ICT development levels in municipalities of Serbia. Interesting is that public institution ICT development is more rapid in some smaller municipalities than in Belgrade. Therefore, the paper will be more concentrated on presenting the process and problems of ICT development of City of Belgrade public institutions and governmental levels. Under the very difficult conditions Town Planning Institute as a major planning agency in Belgrade is making the big effort to increase work efficiency and effectiveness by using ICT tools. Of course, on an agency organization level the process of ICT implementation is suppressed with new problems. This paper will at the end present the overview of 6 month pilot project of initializing and conceptualizing the IS of planning agency and the results that ICT team succeeded to achieve. As a conclusion the action program for 2004. will be presented.