Cities & Government

From bottlenecks to faster decisions

Siloed data means slow decision-making. Bring spatial analysis, real-time monitoring, and decision-making together, without moving data out of your existing systems.

CARTO AI Agent answering which Houston-area places have both high flood risk and high social vulnerability, alongside a map of public assets and flood-risk widgets

Break down departmental silos

Different teams and departments often work off separate, disconnected systems. Run spatial analysis directly from one centralized cloud, without duplication or governance risks.

From reactive maps to real-time analytics

Static maps and PDF reports go stale the moment conditions change. Use live, interactive dashboards and predictive analytics and move from reactive to proactive.

Scale your GIS team across every department

One GIS team can't keep up with requests from every agency at once. Let any staff member — not just GIS specialists — get spatial answers on demand and eliminate bottlenecks.

Trusted by the world's leading organizations
NYC is a CARTO customerCDMX is a CARTO customerCity of Melbourne is a CARTO customerNational Park Service is a CARTO customerSan Diego is a CARTO customerCity of Philadelphia is a CARTO customerAjuntament de Barcelona is a CARTO customer

How it works

Spatial analysis where your data already lives

Moving sensitive data creates risk and delay. CARTO runs inside your cloud data warehouse, so nothing is copied or exported.
Specialist tools slow every new request. Create maps, apps, and workflows in CARTO, or describe them to an agent with CARTO for Agents and refine them in natural language.
Routine questions can pile up on the GIS team. Publish self-service experiences that answer them on demand, so the team can focus on questions requiring greater expertise.

Where public sector teams use CARTO

Mobility & Transportation Planning

Understanding how people actually move takes more data and compute than legacy desktop GIS can handle.

CARTO analyzes billions of mobility and traffic records natively in your cloud warehouse, at a speed legacy GIS can't match — so cities act on real patterns, not samples.

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Mobility & Transportation Planning with carto

Climate Resilience & Environmental Management

Climate and hazard risk shifts faster than static maps can keep up with.

Run live risk models natively in your own warehouse, at state-and-region scale — so risk analysis stays current, not just accurate on the day it was made.

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Climate Resilience & Environmental Management with carto

Public Safety & Emergency Response

Emergency response can't wait on a GIS analyst to build a map — but that's how most agencies still work.

With CARTO, turn incident, mobility, and infrastructure data into instant answers, right from your existing cloud, so any responder gets a live map, not a queue.

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Public Safety & Emergency Response with carto

Urban Planning & Infrastructure Management

Planning stalls when agencies, consultants, and the public all work off different, outdated sources of truth.

With CARTO, everyone collaborates on the same live data, straight from your warehouse, and plans move at the speed of a conversation, not a file transfer.

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Urban Planning & Infrastructure Management with carto

Government Data & Innovation

When every department uses its own GIS data, insights never cross agency lines and every team rebuilds the same map.

CARTO centralizes geospatial data as one governed layer inside your existing warehouse, so departments collaborate — not duplicate.

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Government Data & Innovation with carto
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Webinar

3 Ways Governments Can Better Serve Their Citizens With Spatial Analytics

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Frequently asked questions

Does our data stay inside our own systems?

Yes. CARTO runs the analysis inside your existing cloud data warehouse — BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Databricks, or Oracle. Data never moves, and the access controls, encryption, and audit logging your security and compliance teams already approved continue to apply unchanged.

Can CARTO replace desktop GIS for a city or government agency?

For most analytical work, yes. Legacy desktop GIS requires specialist skills, separate environments, and manual data movement between systems. CARTO runs spatial analysis natively in the cloud data warehouse the agency already uses, so any staff member can get a live map or a spatial answer without waiting on a GIS analyst to build one.

Can I ask questions from Claude, ChatGPT, or Microsoft Copilot?

Yes. With CARTO for Agents, these platforms can build maps, run workflows, and query your warehouse. They are bound by the same permissions as the user who connects them, and every action is logged. Learn more about CARTO for Agents.

How is GIS used in urban planning?

Planners use GIS to map land use, zoning, transport networks, and demographics, then test how growth or new development would affect them. With CARTO, planners can run those scenarios as reusable workflows on live data and share the results as interactive maps with other departments and the public.

What is a smart city, and where does spatial analysis fit?

A smart city uses data from sensors, services, and infrastructure to plan and run the city better. Most of that data has a location, so spatial analysis is what turns it into decisions: where to add transit, which assets need repair, and which neighborhoods are most exposed to risk. CARTO runs that analysis inside the city's cloud data warehouse, so it stays current as new data arrives.

Give every department instant spatial answers

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