GIS in Urban Planning: CartoDB used by Cordoba City Council (Spain)

In Southern Spain there is a city that was once the capital of Hispania Baetica during the Roman Empire. At present it is well known because of its incredible cultural and monumental patrimony: Cordoba, in the community of Andalusia. Thanks to its historic legacy, the old town of Cordoba was recognized in 1994 as a World Heritage Site (the Mosque-Cathedral and also to all the streets and buildings around it).

In this blog post we show you how the Urban Planning Department of the Cordoba City Council, fulfilling one of the main objectives of providing information to citizens in a simple and comprehensive way, has made use of CartoDB to visualize important data of the area.

Mapping plans, building, collections and archaeological interventions

Since 2013, the city administration has been publishing data and important information of the territorial and urban management of Cordoba on the official website www.gmucordoba.es. All the information with a geographic or spatial component has been included in the category “Plans and Maps”. Cordoba City Council uses open source software (QGIS and PostGIS) to manage data internally, and have found in CartoDB the most cost-effective way to publish this data on the web.

Development plans in the city

What better but to show the development plans in a visual manner. In this interactive map, the administration is able to display where the work will take place and, at the same time, share documentation and context information.

Buildings on undeveloped land

The Council of Cordoba has done extensive work examining the undeveloped lands in the area using different photogrammetric and mapping bases. On this map, the clusters of existing buildings on undeveloped land in the municipality of Cordoba are presented. To know more about the topic, go here. The information is only available in Spanish.

Protected goods collection of the historic center of Cordoba

As we said before, Cordoba is recognized due to its incredible cultural and monumental patrimony. Therefor, a protected goods collection of the historic center exists. On the map above you can observe where the most important buildings, monuments and landmarks of the city are located, as well as significant additional information.

Archaeological interventions

This is an interactive visualization that shows everything from cadastral parcels and roads to areas subjected to development planning, where has been made an archaeological intervention. The information is current as of September 2009 and includes the basic data for its contextualization.

As an open data initiative, some of data sets are open to download in various cartographic formats (CSV, KML, Shapefile, and GeoJSON) and can be used in accordance with the license specified in the legal notice of the web portal. The GIS company Almagre has been collaborating with Cordoba City Council to prepare the data and visualizations.

When we asked the maps development team of the Cordoba City Council why they decided to use CartoDB instead of other visualization tools, the answer was clear: “The selection of CartoDB was marked by the possibilities of the tool to generate visualizations easily and quickly, allowing us to edit published data and selecting information offered. Also, CartoDB allows to do more advanced work using HTML language to include pictures or links on our website.”

Archaeological Routes: Discover Roman and Islamic Cordoba

Almagre has also created this interactive map with routes to discover the many Roman and Islamic monuments in the city.

Have you been also working on a project to show valuable information about your city using CartoDB? We would love to see it! Share it with us on Twitter. And if you want to start creating maps such as these, go to CartoDB and sign up for a free account.