In response to an unsolicited proposal, the Office of Policy Development and Research, Department of Housing and Urban Development granted $340,000 to the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) entitled "Global Urban Quality: An Analysis of Urban Indicators Using Geographic Information Science (GIS).

The mutual goals of the Office of Policy Development and Research and UCGIS are to:

Develop long-term relationships between the UCGIS member universities and the paired organizations in the emerging nations to increase the capacity within the developing countries to continue urban indicator analysis on a long-term basis.

UCGIS Solicitation

The HUD grant enabled the University Consortium for Geographic Information science (UCGIS) to issue a solicitation for proposals. The proposals were reviewed and five universities were selected. The winning universities were:

Each university collaborated with academic institutions and government agencies in emerging nations to develop web-based training and analysis programs on the application of geographic information systems for urban indicator modeling.  The project complements the Urban Indicators Programme of the United Nation’s Global Urban Observatory, by use of UCGIS member institutions to develop programs to train personnel in developing countries on the application of geographic information systems (GIS) technology.  GIS is used to disaggregate country and city indicator data to sub-areas within cities to help evaluate the spatial dynamics of urban quality within larger metropolitan areas.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team is headed by Drs Emily Talen, Farank Miraftab, Lewis Hopkins and Zorica-Nedovic-Budic. The University of Illinois is 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.

Dr. Gerard Rushton and Michael McNulty head the University of Iowa team. The National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India and the Department of Geography at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria are collaborating with the University of Iowa.

Drs Robert Rugg and Weiping Wu are heading the Virginia Commonwealth University team with Dr John Accordino. VCU is collaborating with 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.

West Virginia University's team is headed by Dr. Daniel Weiner with Drs Gregory Elmes, Calvin Masilela and Dr. Brent McCusker as co-investigators. Dr. McCusker is the project administrator. West Virginia University is collaborating with the Universide de Catolica de Mocambique in Beira, Mozambique.

Professor William Huxhold, Cheryl Ajirotutu, Jochen Albrecht and Dr. Laxmi Ramasubramanian are heading the University of Wisconsin — Milwaukee team. The City of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the City of Dakar, Senegal, the Ecole Superieure Polytechnique and the University of Cheikh Aanta Diop-Dakar are collaborators on the project.

Dr. Kenneth Dueker is the overall project coordinator. His responsibilities include: providing oversight, intellectual support and peer review for the UCGIS participating universities, identifying possibilities and techniques for linking the micro-level data developed through the individual projects to the macro data, coordinating and producing the final report, and working with the Advisory Board.

UCGIS private affiliate member Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) is supporting the effort through donation of ArcIMS and ArcView software to participating universities. In addition, ESRI has provided GIS software to cities in developing countries cooperating on this project with UCGIS and the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (HABITAT) and its Global Urban Observatory Urban Indicators Programme.

Figure 1: Map of the Five Participating Universities