(Leipzig/ Berlin) – Municipal administrations often lack resources to analyze collected data. So far, inner-city relocations, city-surrounding hikes or commuter connections have not been sufficiently recorded. With the new hin&weg application, such dynamic processes can now be displayed much more easily. The software was developed in an exchange between science and municipal practice at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (IfL). The German Institute for Urban Studies (Difu) supported and accompanied the transfer process to the municipalities. The new analysis and visualization tool is now available to the public free of charge.
“The application is intended to support politics and administration in reacting promptly and with foresight to new developments in inner-city and regional migration and in making more targeted location decisions, for example for daycare centers, schools or the transport infrastructure,” explains Professor Francis Harvey, who headed the project at the IfL .
The hin&weg application can be used intuitively without much prior knowledge and does not require a connection to the Internet. In this way, it is very easy to work out current findings about spatial development processes and urban-rural interdependencies in cities and communities, but also in rural districts. The results can be visualized in the form of maps, tables or diagrams and used for political communication or exchange with citizens.
The tool was developed as part of a project funded by the Leibniz Association at the IfL in Leipzig. “The special thing about the project was that the entire development process was designed to be participatory and took place in close cooperation with 18 municipalities,” says Dr. Henrik Scheller, project manager at Difu. Darmstadt, Essen, Esslingen am Neckar, Halle (Saale), Heidelberg, Jena, Karlsruhe, Koblenz, Leipzig, Ludwigshafen, Magdeburg, Münster, Offenbach am Main, Potsdam, Rostock, Stuttgart, Trier and the district of Gifhorn were there.
The participation process of the project included workshops, test phases and feedback loops with the employees of the respective statistics and urban planning departments. You have tested the various visualization types and analysis functions of the individual software versions with data from different spatial levels, from the statistical district to the federal states. Thanks to their suggestions, the software could be adapted to the specific requirements of the municipalities.
Source and contact address:
German Institute for Urban Studies (Difu) Press Office Zimmerstr. 13-15, 10969 Berlin Telephone: (030) 39001-0, Fax: (030) 39001-100
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