Urban indicators are designed to measure the quality of life and the nature of development of an urban area. They can also be used to make comparisons over time and space to form the basis for urban development policies. The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the United Nations both emphasize the usefulness of indicators in policy making. IDRC describes indicators as " essentially pieces of information that reveal conditions and, over time, trends. These indicators can be used to make policy and planning decisions, to identify whether policy goals and targets are being met, and sometimes to predict change." According to United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (UNCHS), "indicators are models that simplify complex subjects into a few numbers which can be used to determine policy."

In developing countries the lack of good data and indicators severely constrains the ability to develop and analyze effective urban policy. A sustained and systematic appraisal of urban problems is needed to provide the overall picture of the city and how it functions and an indication of the relationships between the performance of individual sectors and broader social and economic development results (Leitmann, 1999).

The Global Urban Observatory is the UNCHS Habitat's facility for monitoring and evaluating the implementation of the Habitat Agenda and Agenda 21. This body was created through a resolution by the 1996 UNCHS Habitat II Conference in Istanbul, Turkey, that "All partners of the Habitat Agenda, including local authorities, the private sector, and communities should regularly MONITOR and EVALUATE their own performances in the implementation of the Habitat Agenda through comparable human settlement and shelter INDICATORS…" (Paragraph 240 of the Habitat Agenda). The Urban Indicators Program (UIP) and the Best Practice and Local Leadership (BLP) together make up the Global Urban Observatory. This Urban Indicators Program was born of the realization that many cities of the world (particularly the developing world) are faced with an information crisis, which seriously undermine their capacity to develop and analyze urban policy.

The meaning and role of indicators has thus been defined: "...a measure that summarizes information about a particular subject and may point to particular problems … (and) provides a reasonable response to specific needs and questions…" (UNDP, 2000). Regardless of the definition, literature has demonstrated that various indicators based on easily obtained data can offer useful intelligence for making strategic choices about directing and managing future growth. Furthermore, while indicators primarily show trends, prioritize and define targets, provide qualitative and quantitative information etc, (Barnejee, 1996; Leitmann, 1999), they can also be more than pieces of information if designed in response to well defined policy objectives (Sawicki and Flynn, 1996). In a special issue of the Journal of the American Planning Association devoted to a discussion of indicators, Banerjee (1996:222) summarized the purposes of indictors as:

To measure performance of policies and programs; to examine trends; to monitor the condition of a city or a region; to inform decision-makers; to raise awareness of the public; to define targets; to set planning objectives; to compare localities horizontally (across space) or longitudinally (over time); to raise flags in an early warning system; to guide strategic investment choices; to challenge conventional wisdom; and so forth.

Sawicki and Flynn (1996) and Leitmann (1999) argue that indicators must be capable of affecting citizen action and public policy making, and hence must be formulated through a broad-based partnership approach involving all levels of decision-making and all stakeholders. However, it has been argued that stakeholder participation in this process has always remained questionable as experts dominate the scene (Leitmann, 1999).

Indicators can be used to measure conditions at varying geographical levels. For example, national indicators are used to measure and compare the level of development of different countries. Within a country, there can be indicators at the regional level or at the city level. Most indicators in current use are at the national or the city level. However city-wide indicators are not always a true reflection of the level of conditions - especially in the case of cities in the developing world that are characterized by stark socio-economic differences amongst inhabitants. While the affluent enjoy a high quality of life and have access to quality services, the poorer inhabitants of these cities live in miserable conditions, often without basic services. These disparities are also reflected in the spatial segregation of the urban population based on the level of access to amenities and infrastructure (Portes and Johns, 1989).

Availability of reliable and appropriate data at the intra-city scale is a problem. There is a need to build national and local capacity to collect globally comparable and useful information on urban conditions and trends, to convert the information to knowledge through appropriate techniques, and to apply this knowledge in formulating and modifying urban policies and programs (UNCHS, 1999). Addressing this need will help to resolve information and knowledge gaps that blur the vision of city leaders and the hopes and aspirations of urban citizenry.

The spatial nature of urban phenomena prescribes the use of geospatial technologies in urban management. GIS analysis is mainly used during the informed consultation phase to generate physical and social information, including key correlations, and for monitoring the implementation of plans in cities. Sawicki and Flynn (1996) engaged a thorough conceptual and theoretical examination of the literature where they identify urban environmental indicators as the precursors of neighborhood indicators in the United States.

To illustrate the relevance of GIS, it is argued "With many records located in space, the GIS can then aggregate them to any level of geography: city blocks, neighborhoods, census block groups, tracts, municipalities and counties (Sawicki and Flynn, 1996:166). Furthermore, the analytical capabilities of GIS have made the technology more than just a communicative visual tool hence most applicable in the development of indicators for evaluating urban policy and the quality of our cities. This way, the use of the technology would fall within the five geographic information science (GI Science) potential areas for planning as identified by Nedovic-Budic (2000:82): database development, integration of geospatial technologies with urban models, building of planning support systems, facilitating discourse and participation, and evaluating planning practice and technological impact.

Applications of GIS have recently disseminated to developing nations. Despite the rapid adoption, the use of the technology has tended to reside in externally funded projects or state agencies and rarely is it owned and used by people at the grassroots. Similarly, there has not been a coordinated style of adoption and use in many countries. Although local authorities in different countries have engaged GIS at different levels, enormous gaps in information and citywide data have become commonplace.

First Symposium

The project principal investigators met in Washington DC February 6-7, 2001 for a Symposium on Urban Indicators. The agenda for this symposium included: 1) demonstrations of the capacity of UCGIS member institutions to perform the analyses; and, 2) investigation of the availability of data in the developing countries for incorporation into the developed analytical models. The symposium consisted of invited presentations from UCGIS member universities describing work currently being done on urban indicators and on related GIS activities within developing countries, and presentations by interested government and international agencies. Presentations were also made by: UCGIS President, William Huxhold; UCGIS Executive Director, Susan McDonald Jampoler; Alven Lam (HUD); John Geraghty (HUD/International); David Chase (HUD/OPDR); Ann Johnson (ESRI); Richard Campbell (Cobblestone Concepts); and representatives of the UN Habitat, HUD, and the World Bank provided useful background on the general interest in Global Urban Indicators and the use of these Indicators in UN, World Bank, and US policy and planning contexts. These sessions provided a larger context for the present UCGIS grant and placed the work of the five universities in perspective.

Each of the participating universities made brief presentations at the Symposium, outlining their proposed activities, providing an introduction to their partner institutions, and current state of the project. Two or more persons represented each university. Several of the foreign partner institutions were also represented. The presentations highlighted the considerable differences in interpreting and addressing the main purposes of the UCGIS/HUD RFP. The discussions and small group session that followed were helping in clarifying individual projects and further defined some of the common, and divergent, approaches.

Originally, the projects were to finish their work by September 30, 2001. However, it was decided at the Symposium that UCGIS would ask that this date be changed in view of the late start and the implementation plans of the projects. A time extension for the project has been approved with a new completion date of May 31, 2002.

UN Habitat (UNHCS) Conference

Susan McDonald Jampoler, William Huxhold, and Gerard Rushton participated in the UN Habitat (UNCHS) conference in New York, June 6-7, 2001 as a member of the HUD/UCGIS team. They participated in three meetings involving Guenter Karl, Coordinator of the Global Urban Observatory, Christine Auclair, Indicator Specialist, and their Chief, Ms. Nefise Bazoglu, Urban Secretariat, HUD Deputy Assistant Secretary Shannon Sorzano and HUD Secretary Martinez.

Other sessions included "Implementation of the Habitat Agenda", chaired by Ms. Bazoglu with panelists Guenter Karl, Jay Moor and Alven Lam of HUD. Participants were involved in discussions on two major Habitat projects: The State of the World's Cities and the Report of Urban Settlements.

These sessions were very useful in examining the relationship between current urban indicator research and training in the UNCHS, HUD, and the several universities participating in the UCGIS Urban Indicators project.

Second Symposium

A second Symposium on Global Urban Indicators was held in New York City, January 8-11, 2002. The agenda for this symposium included: 1) presentations from the five university teams on progress during the first year; 2) assessment of progress and future directions by observers and participants; 3) recommendations by the international partners, functioning as an advisory board, and 4) discussion of GIS and web-based training materials. The symposium focused on presentation of research results and the description of training materials developed by the five university teams on urban indicators and on related GIS activities within developing countries. Presentations were also made by: UCGIS Project Coordinator, Kenneth Dueker; HUD Project Monitor, Alven Lam; UN Habitat observer Christine Auclair; software representatives from ESRI, Ann Johnson, Mike Phoenix, C.J. Cote, and Daniel Zimble; and Shlomo Angel from New York University. They provided useful assessment of progress and advice on development of GIS-based training materials and the use of these material and urban indicators in UN, US AID, and US policy and planning contexts.

Each project team presented a report on their activities that served to describe their focus and approach:

1. The University of Iowa described their focus on health-related indicators and analysis for use in policy analysis and the planning of health services and facilities. They are converting and adapting GIS-based analysis for use in medical geography classes in the U.S. for application in Nigeria and India. The Iowa team has well-established capacity-building connections in these two countries.

2. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team collaborating with the Kathmandu Mapping Project in Kathmandu, Nepal, the Department of Information Systems Technology in Cape Town, South Africa, and the University of Botswana in Gaborone, Botswana on the measurement of accessibility to urban services. This project uses GIS to visually explore and analyze disparities in access to housing, infrastructure, urban services and amenities. They are developing applications in ArcGIS, ArcIMS and ArcView. The focus is on developing measures of accessibility that are applicable in several developing countries. The capacity-building connections with international partners are moving from formative to an advanced stage.

3. The Virginia Commonwealth University team is collaborating with and focusing on the data needs of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies and Faculty of Architecture at the University of San Carlos of Guatemala and the Open Research Laboratory of Remote Sensing at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China. They are developing data resources and training materials in Spanish and Chinese. The training modules are for digitizing, map projections, scale, data integration, aggregation/disaggregation, map design, and analysis.

4. West Virginia University is collaborating with the Universide de Catolica de Mocambique in Beira, Mozambique. Jointly they are developing a database that uses infrastructure as the focus for support of planning and decision making at the local level. They are developing web-based training programs on the application of GIS for modeling of urban indicators in Beira.

5. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee team is collaborating with the City of Dakar, Senegal, the Ecole Superieure Polytechnique and the University of Cheikh Aanta Diop-Dakar on the project of participatory action research and capacity building for Dakar. Participatory action research employs a partnership approach to map and subsequently analyze selected urban indicators using GIS.  UWM has developed training modules. Selected staff based in Senegal will develop their skills to use GIS and analyze urban indicator data through participation in this research project.

The project team presentations and the ensuing discussion illustrated the difficulty in reconciling the need for uniform and consistent urban indicators from the top down or global perspective, while 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. Consequently, the objective to develop comparable indicators was compromised by this tailoring of activities to local needs.

Discussion of plans to continue the project addressed the need to generate comparable data while at the same time being responsive to the needs of the international partners, and their role in providing data and analysis on behalf of local planers and policy analysts. The project teams accepted the need for a common conceptual model of urban infrastructure and services with measures of capacity, demand, and stress (disparity in capacity and demand, in time and space, in relation to norms). The project teams will exchange approaches and measures on these dimensions toward more comparable indicators of conditions and trends. The amount of growth and change that was detected heightens interest in and the importance of the temporal dimension. More communication is needed between university teams toward increasing uniformity in mapping temporal change and in placing small-area indicators in a city, region, province and nation context.

The discussion of GIS software tools for the development of applications provided comparative information on what approaches were productive and what proved problematic. Applications that relied on the proven and stable technology of ArcView 3.2 were most successful although they did not achieve the objective of being web based. Several teams experience difficulty and limited success in working with ArcIMS. The difficulties stemmed from limited experience with the software, too ambitious expectations of it, and limitations of the early version of the software. A new version of ArcIMS should help, although bandwidth and limitations of hardware at the international client side may limit the application of web-based GIS applications. In the longer term, ArcGIS may be a more robust way of accessing data remotely for GIS analysis. The University of Illinois has already made this shift; three of their four exercises are now implemented in ArcGIS.

The contribution of GIS software by ESRI has been beneficial, particularly to the international partners. The announcement that ESRI has expanded its educational program by adding resources on the international side will serve the project well.

HUD's interest in the project continues to be strong. They see the strength of the varied approach of the five university teams, of the capacity building that is taking place, and the development of training materials. HUD is looking for a compilation of results from the development of GIS-based training materials, and development of indicators of urban infrastructure and services capacity, demand, and stress that will be of use by local governments in the U.S. and in developing countries.

This project serves HUD's agenda of working with the United Nations on monitoring progress in implementing the Habitat agenda. Implementing strategies of: 1) forming partnerships; 2) adopting enabling approaches; 3) activating participatory mechanisms; 4) building capacity; and 5) monitoring progress through networking and modern information technologies are addressed in this project. In addition to these contributions of capacity building toward comparative urban indicators, the project contributes to the capacity building for the building of environmental management information systems that focus on mapping and GIS analysis within urban areas.