Focus
History of Geographic Information System (GIS) development
In recent years, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been widely used in different disciplines, including urban planning. The emergence of GIS leads to a fundamental change in spatial data collection, storage, management and analysis. In the planning field, spatial data and attributed data of GIS are suitably “linked” together for various kinds of planning tasks. GIS can also be applied to planning management works, such as that related to plan production and development control.
Since the early 1990s, the Planning Department has used GIS to support the Town Planning Board (TPB) in the preparation of statutory Outline Zoning Plans (OZPs). In addition, town planners and survey officers utilised GIS to carry out spatial analysis such as land suitability analysis as well as data queries for various types of planning management tasks.
In 2004, The Town Planning (Amendment) Bill 2003 was passed by the Legislative Council. The main objectives of the Town Planning (Amendment) Ordinance 2004 are to streamline the plan-making process and planning approval procedures, enhance the openness and transparency of the planning system, and strengthen planning enforcement control in the rural New Territories. The Amendment Ordinance came into operation on 10 June 2005.
To meet these objectives, a number of statutory public consultation procedures have been incorporated into the planning system. Due to this change of requirement, the processing of planning applications, which involves additional procedures, has become a new challenge for the Planning Department.
Rationale of Adopting New Information Technologies to Process Planning Applications
As far as processing of planning applications is concerned, upon the receipt of a planning application by the TPB Secretariat, it would be processed by the Department’s staff. A planning report would then be prepared for TPB’s consideration within the statutory time limit.
In terms of manpower, the Department’s staff at different ranks the professional town planners, survey officers and technical officers are involved in different stages in the processing of planning applications. Apart from staff of the Department, staff of other relevant government departments are also required to provide their views and professional advice. For instance, the Environmental Protection Department and Lands Department provide input on environmental and land administrative matters, respectively.
To facilitate high quality public consultation work and to meet other statutory requirements of the prevailing Town Planning Ordinance, the best option would be for the Department to streamline the workflow in the processing of planning applications and to adopt appropriate information technologies to cope with the situation
Features of the Integrated GIS Workflow System
Against this background, the Department has developed an integrated GIS workflow system. The System was launched in early 2008 and is now being used for processing planning application amongst other functions. The main features of this system are (i) to closely monitor the processing of planning applications, (ii) to facilitate timely dissemination of information to the public, and (iii) to enable data sharing among relevant systems in the Department.
(i) Monitoring
The processing of a planning application involves the carrying out of a number of complicated work procedures by the Department’s staff. Various major tasks involved in the work procedures include dissemination of information to the public at different stages, collection of public comments during the public consultation period (three weeks for s.16 planning applications) and preparation of planning report for the TPB’s consideration (with public comments, professional advice from the relevant government departments and detailed planning analysis prepared by the Department’s staff incorporated). Details of the workflow are given in Figure 1.
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Figure 1 : Major steps involved in the processing of planning applications |
Basically, the processing of planning applications is a "through-train" mode of operation. In this mode, delay or error caused by any one of the responsible officers will affect the entire process. To prevent any slippage, all these processes would need to be closely monitored by the system. In monitoring the workflow, once any delay or irregularity is detected by the system, the alert system will be automatically activated. Staff concerned will be notified and requested to speed up the subsequent work processes in order not to cause any further delay.
A hypothetical workflow diagram is used to illustrate how the monitoring function operates (Figure 2). Under normal circumstances, after Task A is completed, the workflow is branched off with Task B and Task D in one branch and Task C and Task E in the other. After Tasks B to E are completed, the two work branches will merge and Task F can then commence.
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Figure 2 : Hypothetical example to demonstrate the monitoring function of the workflow system
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In this hypothetical example, in case there is a delay in the processing of Task B, Task C and Task E can proceed but not Task D and Task F (Figure 2). After the delay is detected by the system, an alert message is forwarded not only to the officer responsible for Task B but the other officers responsible for any downstream and parallel tasks as well. These officers would be advised to expedite the tasks for which they are responsible in order to prevent any further slippage.
(ii) Information dissemination
Public consultation plays an extremely important role in the processing of planning applications. Traditional public consultation method requires face-to-face contact or communication through mail and fax. This kind of consultation approach may not totally meet the requirement of the new planning application process.
Apart from the traditional means of communication like mail and fax, information on planning applications is therefore disseminated to or collected from the public by the system at the following stages:
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the gist about the details of the planning application is posted onto the Statutory Planning Portal (SPP) upon the receipt of a planning application; |
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during the three-week public consultation period, the public is invited to submit online comments through the TPB website (Figure 3); |
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Figure 3 : Making online comments (Source: TPB website)
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the public is informed of the gist of TPB’s decisions several hours after the meeting through the website; |
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detailed decision of a planning application is disseminated through the TPB website once the minutes of the meeting are confirmed, usually two weeks after the meeting (Figure 4); |
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Figure 4 : Detailed decision of TPB on a planning application (Source: Statutory Planning Portal, TPB Website)
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the public can search for information of planning applications (including location plan and TPB’s decision) through the SPP shortly after the minutes of the meeting are confirmed. (Figure 5) |
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Figure 5 : Location plan of planning applications (Source: Statutory Planning Portal, TPB website)
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(iii) Data sharing
Facilitating data sharing among relevant systems in the Planning Department is one of the major advantages of the workflow system.
In the workflow process, data prepared at certain points in time would be collected and stored in the geo-database of the system. When the data is properly stored, the stored data can then be retrieved by all relevant systems from the database for different purposes at subsequent stages. Under this design, the efficiency of the entire workflow can be enhanced and the consistency and accuracy of the data can be maintained.
Way forward
The integrated workflow GIS system has proved to be a very efficient and effective tool to assist the Department’s staff to handle a large number of planning applications, which involves close collaboration among the staff working on different tasks and physically located at different offices. In 2009, a total of about 1 400 planning applications were processed under this system and the online-comment function has been increasingly popular for public to submit their counts.
With advancement of technologies and upgrading of the Government IT infrastructure, the Planning Department will continue to adopt more IT technologies to enhance efficiency of the current system in order to provide high quality services to the public in the years to come.
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