The project was originally envisioned as a three-year effort, but only the first year was funded. Consequently, the goals of the project have not been fully achieved, but this report represents evidence of considerable progress to serve as a basis for a decision for continuation funding.

The university teams and their international partners provided insights into monitoring urban change and local capacity building. This work illustrated the difficulty in reconciling the need for uniform and consistent urban indicators from the top down or global perspective, while at the same time developing a bottoms-up perspective of developing useful data for local planning and policy analysis. With a high level of participation and influence by the international partners, the five project teams emphasized the bottoms-up perspective and developed data and training materials suited to local needs.

As a result of different local needs and interests, the university teams worked independently and the resulting data, indicators, spatial analyses, and training materials are not very consistent. Future research will compare and evaluate these differences carefully to provide a basis for a more concerted effort, while at the same time allowing for addressing unique needs of local partners.

The instructional materials that have been developed by the five universities vary in content and form. They are referred to as Exercises, Labs, Modules, and Training Materials. Some are Internet-based exercises while others are support classroom presentations. Each set of instructional materials was developed from available resources at each institution and the local needs of international partners. Consequently, GIS-based instructional materials lack consistent "look and feel" and content. The follow-on project will compare approaches and methods, and work toward a common look and feel of training materials, while at the same time allowing for unique features needed for different types of analyses and differing local needs. Similarly, the Project web pages for each of the universities have different content and formats. Follow-on research will strive for a common look and feel of web pages for the five universities. Both will have to be comparative and collaborative efforts to assess strengths and weaknesses of current training materials and web pages.

These differences are illustrated by the list of training materials developed by the five universities.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Exercise 1 Container: Number of facilities contained within a given areal unit

Exercise 2 Covering: Number. of facilities within a given distance from a point of origin

Exercise 3 Minimum Distance: Distance between a point and nearest facility

Exercise 4 Gravity - Network based facility service area

Exercise 5 Accessibility to linear infra structure (ArcIMS implementation pending)

The University of Iowa

Laboratory 1 Making a choropleth map in ArcView

Laboratory 2 Geocoding by address using ArcView

Laboratory 3 Spatial filtering using DMAP and ArcView

Laboratory 4 Probability testing using DMAP and ArcView

Laboratory 5 Data manipulation and spatial interpolation

Laboratory 6 Spatial interpolation: Analysis of Iowa breast cancer patients

Laboratory 7 Analysis of Iowa breast cancer patients: Distance to treatment facility

Laboratory 8 GIS and health resources

Virginia Commonwealth University

Training materials

Linking data sets with maps

Digitizing

Map projections

Scale

Data integration

Aggregation/disaggregation of spatial data

Map design

Analysis

West Virginia University

Module 1 Data preparation

Module 2 Digital mapping

Module 3 Introduction to GIS

Module 4 Image analysis

Module 5 Internet map server

Module 6 Model building

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Laboratory 1 Introducing ArcView

Laboratory 2 Digitizing

Laboratory 3 Exploring different data sets

Laboratory 4 Query/overlay/buffer

Laboratory 5 Analysis Template

 

This project has provided experience with the transfer of expertise in evaluating urban indicators using spatial analytical techniques and geographic information systems from participating universities to paired organizations within the emerging nations. This transfer of knowledge utilized web-based training programs.

This project also enabled the building of local capacity to collect and use policy-related indicators. The relationship between the UCGIS member universities and their international partners increases the capacity within the developing countries to continue urban indicator analysis on a long-term basis.