Improving GIS use in City Retail Planning: A Look at the Dunedin City Council's Geographic Information System

The paper explores the history of Geographical Information System (GIS) use in order to understand what problems can be faced by city retail planners utilizing the technology. Different GIS software packages and system types are also studied to provide an assisting information sheet that could help an organization choose an appropriate GIS architecture for its business processes. The research goes on to study a local planning authority, the Dunedin City Council’s (DCC) GIS architecture, and assess its GIS use according to the studied literature. An interview is carried out with a knowledgeable DCC representative to solicit the information, and to identify problems that the DCC is facing with regards to the use of GIS in city retail planning. A GIS dataset, obtained from the DCC, is used along with spatial data gathered over several years by the University of Otago’s Marketing Department, to recommend and demonstrate practical solutions to the DCC’s problems. The demonstration will feature added functionality and data to the DCC’s original dataset, with the purpose of showing how the system can be improved to provide better analysis opportunities. The recommendations are targeted towards any entity that uses GIS without being technically oriented, specifically city retail planning entities, but are also applicable to other marketing related professions to a large extent. The recommendations include creating a structured data collection and recording plan, as well as adding some a number of data fields that are crucial to make better use of existing GIS software packages. The GIS functions and resources used to generate the demonstration and recommendations are detailed, to allow the reader to recreate the scenarios discussed and demonstrated for their own use