The economic and social development of our environment, both built and natural, is guided by the planning process. The Planning Acts stipulate that each local Authority must prepare and publish a city or county development Plan on every seven years. This is one of the major statutory obligations of a Local Authority.

The preparation and publication of the Development Plan is an inherently map based process. The application of GIS to this process can bring about benefits internally within the Local Authority and externally to its Citizens.

Dun Laoghaire Rathdown, Fingal and South Dublin County Councils now use ArcGIS to prepare and publish their Development Plan. In these Local Authorities, ArcGIS transformed the traditional process centered around CAD drawings to a new process based on multiple users editing a single continuous seamless Geodatabase. The resultant Geodatabase is then used to produce map products in both printed and online form. This process transformation has increased efficiency and improved quality whilst simultaneously enhancing the cartographic products.

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  Urban and Regional Planning

  Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County is located between the outer suburbs of Dublin City and the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains on the East Coast of Ireland. Its population is approximately 190,000 people. Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council approached ESRI Ireland in 2008 to discuss their requirements to prepare and publish the County Development Plan 2010 -2016.

  Introduction

  Each County and City Council is obliged to produce a Development Plan every five years which sets out an overall strategy for how development is planned.  An important aspect in the production of these plans is the three opportunities that are provided for Public Consultations.

  Client

  Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County is located between the outer suburbs of Dublin City and the Dublin/Wicklow Mountains on the East Coast of Ireland. Its population is approximately 190,000 people. Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council approached ESRI Ireland in 2008 to discuss their requirements to prepare and publish the County Development Plan 2010 -2016.

  The Challenge

  The Council had prepared the Maps for previous Development Plans using a CAD system from which they had produced printed hardcopy map documents. The Council had recognised that the new development Plan would need to be an Internet ready product which would lend itself to display and interrogation on the Council’s internet site. Because an interactive map is essentially scale free the Council wished to ensure that their zoning geometry corresponded exactly with OSi geometry such that at high levels of zoom there were no discrepancies between the two.

  The Solution

  The Council also came to market for an internet based Development Plan Viewer. The viewer was to enable the Council publish the Development Plan on the internet for public scrutiny and response during the Public consultation phase. ESRI Ireland was selected to build the Development Plan Viewer using ArcGIS Server and later to build an associated eConsultation system which enabled members of the Public to submit responses to the Development Plan online. The same system was later adopted by Fingal County Council who joined the project as a joint stakeholder with Dun Laoghaire Rathdown.

  The Benefits

  During the preparation process major efficiency benefits were gained from the use of ArcGIS compared to the previous CAD system, the resultant product is also of a higher quality in terms of precision and cartography. The Council have now completed the capture of the new (Draft) Development Plan 2010 – 2016 and published it using the Development Plan Viewer on the Council internet site. During the 10-week public consultation period 18th April to 3rd July 2009 the Council received over 1900 submissions, 178 of which were received online through the eConsultation system.

  The Technology Used

  The Council also required a system that was based on a continuous seamless database rather than on drawing files so that multiple Drawing Office personnel could perform edits at the same time. This is not possible with a file based system and can be a major hindrance to efficiency. The Council selected ArcGIS as the platform on which to prepare the Development Plan. ESRI Ireland consultants then worked closely with the Council to design and implement a Geodatabase to hold all the features of interest to the Development Plan process along with their attributes.

  This Geodatabase formed the cornerstone of all further work as it was essentially the template for the Development Plan. On top of this template ESRI Ireland set up ArcGIS project documents within which the Draughtsman could work and a multi-user versioned database which ensured their edits did not conflict with each other. With this infrastructure established the Council proceeded to capture the new geometry and attribution for their Development Plan.

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  Urban and Regional Planning.

  ESRI Ireland & Cora Systems Aid Tyne & Wear in Transport Planning: Together with Cora Systems, ESRI Ireland designed and developed PV Spatial, an integrated mapping component to help Tyne & Wear view their transport planning projects “geographically”.

  Cora Systems Social Urban & Regional Planning

   

  Introduction

  Together with Cora Systems, ESRI Ireland designed and developed PV Spatial, an integrated mapping component to help Tyne & Wear view their transport planning projects “geographically”. This enables them to manage their work coherently, share project information, scheduling tasks and making updates across several geographical areas.

  Client

  The Tyne and Wear is a metropolitan county in the North East of England. The Tyne & Wear Local Transport Plan (LTP) is a five year statutory document prepared by all local authorities which set out a strategy for the development of transport in a particular area. This plan indicates how money is made available in a plan area depending upon the quality of its Local Transport Plan.

  The Challenge

  The main problem with the Local Transport Plan was summarised as “getting the right information, at the right time in the right format”. The key difficulties with five Local Authorities working together on one Program included lack of project visibility and getting information from each local authority for reports.

  The Solution

  PV Spatial by Cora and ESRI Ireland enables Project Managers, Project Teams and IT Managers at Newcastle Upon Tyne to spatially manager their work coherently, sharing project information, scheduling tasks and making updates across several geographic areas.

  The Benefits

  Gary Mac Donald, Tyne and Wear LTP Core Team Manager “The Importance of having knowledge of various hierarchical levels of any project or group of projects cannot be underestimated. This coupled with the Geographic Information Systems mapping element, had made this application an indispensable tool to us in current and future planning initiatives”.

  The Technology Used

  Together with Cora Systems, ESRI Ireland designed and developed Project Vision (PV) Spatial, an integrated mapping component based on ESRI’s ArcIMS product. This seamlessly sits within the Project Vision application and is a scalable Internet Map Server and it is widely used for GIS Web Publishing to deliver maps, data and metadata to many users on the Web.

ArcGIS

ArcGIS is also increasingly being used in the Development Control function of Local Authorities to ensure that proposed developments adhere to the stipulations of the Development Plan as well as to precedence and best practice. In some Local Authorities ArcGIS is used to maintain a digital Register of submitted Planning Applications. In Northern Ireland these Planning Applications can be submitted online using ArcGIS. Once captured, incoming applications can then be spatially compared to the Development Plan Geodatabase to determine constraints during the approval process. They can also be published in interactive map form on the internet for query by the Public.

A number of ESRI Irelands clients are using ArcGIS to prepare and publish Development Plans and Planning Register’s.