Using Data to Bring Order to Land Use Planning and Development
City: Mérida, Mexico
Reporting to: Deputy Director of Regulatory Improvement
The Challenge
Mérida, the largest city on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, is growing rapidly and now has about one million residents. Despite the presence of a long-term urban plan for the area, builders often carry out construction that does not comply with land-use regulations. In part, that is because getting permits can be complex and bureaucratic and there is no digital platform for conducting procedures online. While an existing tool called Geoportal contains a large amount of information on growth plans and city services, its design is too technical for most residents and is used mainly as an internal consultation platform without supporting online transactions.
The City of Mérida’s key priority is to ensure orderly and sustainable urban growth and development across the city and its sub-municipal districts. Guided by a vision set forth in the City Council’s latest strategic plan, Mérida seeks to promote balanced urban development that respects both the natural and social environments, improves mobility, and ensures that municipal growth occurs in a sustainable and well-planned manner. To do that, the city is in the process of updating its 25-year urban development plan. The city also is collaborating with the Bloomberg Cities Idea Exchange program to implement the Visor Urbano platform, a digital one-stop shop for residents to acquire urban development permits. By moving permit transactions online, the city hopes to reduce administrative discretion, strengthen transparency, and mitigate the risks of corruption. Geoportal will remain an important complementary platform containing critical urban and territorial information layers that serve as a foundation for Visor Urbano.
City leaders now hope to modernize and digitize their urban management processes by integrating Visor Urbano with the new long-term urban plan. The hope is to make getting development permits easy and transparent for residents, bring order to new construction, and align development with the city’s urban plan. The changes would address equity by ensuring that all residents have equal access to information and procedures on what can be built where, without having to take time to handle administrative processes in person.
Key questions include:
- How can the Geoportal be redesigned to become a more user-friendly and inclusive platform for residents, not just for professionals?
- What digital strategies and technological tools can be implemented to streamline municipal procedures and reduce bureaucracy?
- How can the upcoming 25-year urban growth plan effectively be incorporated into the Visor Urbano platform to ensure that urban development decisions are guided by updated, accessible information?
- How can the city leverage existing data to facilitate processes, reduce administrative discretion and bureaucracy, and ensure transparency?
What You’ll Do
The fellow will prepare actionable recommendations and prototypes that enhance the usability, accessibility, and functionality of Mérida’s Visor Urbano platform. The fellow will develop tools and strategies to translate complex urban data, including data to be published in the 25-year urban growth plan, as permitted land uses, business operating licenses, and active businesses into formats that residents can easily understand and use. The goal is to ensure that Visor Urbano becomes a practical and inclusive tool for decision making by residents, investors, government employees, and others. This will involve engaging with key stakeholders, including the Municipal Institute of Planning, and municipal offices of Urban Development, Orderly Development and Urban Growth, Innovation and Smart Governance, and Regulatory Improvement.
Key deliverables will include:
- A report comparing the data within the Visor Urbano platform with data generated by municipal departments such as Cadastre, Finance and Treasury, Urban Development, and the Municipal Planning Institute.
- A proposal for indicators that will be important to track, generate, and integrate into Visor Urbano so that municipal officials can make decisions for orderly growth.
- A Geoportal data layer that includes updated information from the 25-year growth plan to support Visor Urbano’s functionality.
What You’ll Bring
The fellow will be expected to possess the following skills:
- Data Analysis
- Design Thinking
- Mapping (GIS)
- Qualitative Interviewing and Analysis
- Spanish Fluency (required)
