CITY KNOWLEDGE: A Middle-out Approach for Enabling Sustainable Municipal Spatial Data Infrastructures

Our paper will support the Positive Integration Scenario by suggesting a realistic and sustainable pathway to move us closer to the utopian situation envisioned for 2016. First of all, we propose to target our efforts to the primary locus of spatial change, i.e. the municipality, hence we call the strategy the City Knowledge approach1. We believe that the creation of sustainable Spatial Data Infrastructures – where data are plentiful and readily available as the scenario suggests – can be achieved by investing time and effort in the creation of comprehensive municipal information systems2. The City Knowledge approach is founded on the premise that urban change falls almost entirely under municipal jurisdiction, and specifically under the purview of individual municipal departments. This paper therefore proposes to “grow ” this knowledge from the middle-out, integrating a top-down approach to standardization3, with a bottom-up approach to neighborhood-scale ‘atomic ’ data accrual4. The “middle-out ” approach combines the benefits of top-down and bottom-up initiatives, while largely avoiding their respective pitfalls. Thus, instead of proposing a top-down solution to municipal data management, this paper suggests a distributed scheme whereby each departmen