Preserving Environmental Quality with Structr

Winterswijk had a very clear idea of what the answer to the above challenges should be. Gerard Overkamp, the project manager, who was on the one hand familiar with physical planning policy and IT and who already knew Structr, brought together the pieces.

After evaluating the alternative providers of an IT solution, Structr was commissioned to create a tool called Atlas Environmental Qualities (short: Atlas).

The starting point for the creation of the Atlas was the description of the concept, the definition of the desired functionality and the requirements of the municipality, which should maintain and further develop the data independently of a provider. To ensure good usability for all involved, a simple, intuitive user interface and a flexible, elegant database design were crucial.

From definition to final review, the Atlas was created and implemented in only four months in cooperation between the project manager and the Structr team. It comprises exactly one user page and less than a dozen pages for all conceivable data maintenance. 

Any number of guidelines, any number of qualities, the Atlas will not only present them on one easy-to-understand page, it also allows other decision makers to add their own data. The Atlas was developed in a very agile way, with short development cycles. Due to the immediate availability of new features in the test environment it was possible to implement and evaluate many different solutions, which led to a high customer satisfaction. On-site workshops were held at regular intervals, allowing future users to influence the development at a very early stage.

What type of qualities are we talking about? Literally dozens. A few examples: the age of a landscape, the type of landscape based on its function and vegetation, the untouched state of a landscape, the presence of buildings, the historical value of buildings and of landscapes, the archeology of each location. And Winterswijk added two interesting new concepts to its policies: darkness and quietness.

Since Winterswijk is so well documented, the rules (laws) for the protection of the defined qualities were already available in the form of documents, which had previously served both as a guide for decisions in the town hall and as an orientation aid for landowners. The Atlas allows the administration of Winterswijk to upload said documents into the system, extract and annotate important sections and create a comprehensive summary of each policy enriched with images and hyperlinks.

Structr, with its flexibility, versatility and power, proved to be the perfect tool to create the Atlas taking APIs, user questions, guidelines and quality into account. 

The database design, which has been created after only two days of intensive collaboration, was optimized several times, revealing another special feature of the application platform: while IT projects usually lead to increasingly complicated solutions over time, Structr convinces with solutions that are increasingly simple and at the same time extremely user-friendly, including in data maintenance.

The Atlas brings together several very innovative solutions to various problems that arise in the decision-making process of public administrations. One of them is the combination of existing geoinformation with measured data on environmental quality from various sources in order to derive regulations.

In addition to that, the Atlas allows citizens to explore and recognize qualities of the surrounding environment to better understand the motivation behind policies and decisions of the administration.