Background

A leading bilateral agency is implementing the project "Sustainable Urban Development - Smart Cities II” (“SUDSC-II”) on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Germany. The project supports the Government of India, and the partner State Governments in resilient, sustainable approaches and solutions for urban development, including infrastructure that considers disaster risk management and the leave-no-one-behind (LNOB) principle.

It also supports Smart Cities in implementing concepts of risk-informed, integrated, resilient, and sustainable urban development.

One of the components of the project is to help develop capacities in Geographical Information Systems for inclusive, climate resilient and disaster resistant spatial planning. To this effect, a series of training workshops along with training content and trainers’ manual is to be developed and organised for functionaries from the participating States. Primus Partners, in association with the reputed Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, Germany was selected to develop and deliver the content, training and the appurtenant training material. The content is also expected to be hosted on the National Urban Learning Platform to be used by urban practitioners in India.

Our Approach

Primus Partners utilized its experience and understanding of State and local Governments in relation to working in areas of spatial planning by categorizing users into three broad categories:

• Technicians – who have functional knowledge of a software and look forward to doing new exercises related to them
• Advocates – senior professionals who utilize data analytics and visualizations from GIS tools developed by the technicians to reach suitable findings and strategies related to spatial planning and sustainability
• Decision makers – who decide on critical and strategic issues related to sustainable urban development based on informed choices and proposals made by the advocates.

A series of course materials on application of GIS in (i) domain areas – such as land use land cover, (ii) functional areas such as hazard and vulnerability mapping and mobility models and (iii) thematic and behavioral areas such as building consensus and mainstreaming gender concerns in sustainable spatial planning were developed and administered across three workshops held in Guwahati, Thiruvananthapuram and New Delhi, accompanied with a training manual, illustrative ‘how to’ videos and sample exercises. The workshops were attended by representatives from all the three categories, with the last one being attended by potential master trainers who would carry forward the exercise.

Benefits

• Participants from all partner States got a chance to refresh their knowledge and skills on GIS, including beginners who had never actually worked on the platforms – through hands-on sessions, videos of which were also made available.
• The entire training was held using open-source software such as QuantumGIS and Eclipse SUMO which are freely available and compatible across all known operating platforms, and carry capabilities comparable to proprietary and expensive software.
• Day to day tasks such as spatial data visualisation, computations of land use and land cover, usage of raster data were (re)explained to the trainees
• Learners were made familiar with various community sourced repositories of spatial data – both vector as well as raster
• Simulation exercises for urban mobility including traffic modelling, and building level microclimate simulation were also conducted, with learners being exposed to overlay solutions that use community driven platforms such as OpenStreet Maps.

In essence, the training and materials were designed to demystify and make spatial data management accessible and easy to understand for all levels of learners – be they technicians, advocates or decision makers.