City Knowledge: An emergent information infrastructure for sustainable urban maintenance, management and planning

Recent advances in geo-spatial technologies, together with a steady decline in their cost, have inspired many spontaneous bottom-up municipal GIS initiatives aimed at improving many aspects of urban maintenance, management or planning. Some communities have institutionalized top-down citywide urban information systems with limited results, due to many organizational and institutional factors. Despite some encouraging progress, comprehensive urban information systems are still not commonplace and planners and …