Case Study · Winterswijk
Preserving environmental quality with Structr
How the municipality of Winterswijk uses Structr to strike a balance between nature conservation, room for further development and citizen participation
Customer
Winterswijk
Industry
Public sector – municipal administration
Country
Netherlands
Structr use case
Key facts & structure
Winterswijk covers an area of 135 km² (30,000 inhabitants) in the easternmost part of the Netherlands.
Its geology, landscape, ecology and cultural history have been described in detail for almost 150 years and are valued by citizens, businesses, non-governmental organisations, scientists and regional and national governments alike. In fact, Winterswijk is the only Dutch municipality whose entire territory is designated a national landscape.
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The rural area of Winterswijk is very important to the municipal administration because it contributes to social and economic vitality. In this respect, the municipality's challenge was to find an ever-changing balance between nature conservation and room for further development, while involving citizens extensively.
With the aim of building the necessary bridges between government and citizens, policy and qualities, and abstract concepts and concrete wishes, the local administration began to integrate a new kind of IT. For the implementation, it chose the Structr application platform.
Key highlights
- Atlas of Qualities that displays environmental quality data from open APIs on a map and combines it with user questions, guidelines and policy documents.
- Area of 135 km²
- 30,000 inhabitants
- Geology, landscape, ecology and cultural history
These and other facts raised many questions, such as:
- How can owners be challenged when the main goal of your policy is to preserve and develop qualities?
- How can you call yourself a transparent government when your policy is spread over dozens of documents and thousands of pages?
- How can we answer the questions of end users when the language of citizens and that of policy makers are clearly so different?
Challenge
People, policy and IT
To preserve the qualities of the rural area, the government of Winterswijk pursues a policy that brings a number of challenges:
- Equal cases should be treated equally by every government. A rule should therefore be clear to everyone and apply to all in similar cases.
- Regulations tend to pile up. An owner who wants to change a building or a land use can easily be confronted with dozens of regulations.
- Policies are written down in many documents, and these documents have to be read from beginning to end before you can be sure you have read everything relevant.
- Policy makers do not always foresee the consequences of their own decisions. The consequences of stacked policies are usually not part of their assessment either. Policy is generally worded quite abstractly, while owners have very concrete wishes.
- The reasons behind a policy are often vague, yet accountability is a central issue for governments.
Description of requirements
Winterswijk had a very clear idea of what the answer to the challenges above should look like. Gerard Overkamp, the project manager, who was familiar with spatial planning policy and IT on the one hand and already knew Structr on the other, brought the pieces together.
After evaluating alternative providers of an IT solution, Structr was commissioned to develop a tool called Atlas Environmental Qualities (Atlas for short).
The starting point for building the Atlas was the description of the concept, the definition of the desired functionality and the requirements of the municipality, which wanted to maintain and further develop the data independently of any vendor. To ensure good usability for everyone involved, a simple, intuitive user interface and a flexible, elegant database design were essential.
Implementation process
From definition to final acceptance, the Atlas was created and implemented in just four months in a collaboration between the project manager and the Structr team. It consists of exactly one user page and fewer than a dozen pages for every conceivable data maintenance task.
Any number of guidelines, any number of qualities – the Atlas not only presents 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 process with short development cycles. Because new features were immediately available in the test environment, many different solutions could be implemented and evaluated, which led to high customer satisfaction. On-site workshops were held at regular intervals, so that future users were able to influence the development at a very early stage.
Data sources
Which 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 unspoilt state of a landscape, the presence of buildings, the historical value of buildings and landscapes, the archaeology of every location. And Winterswijk added two interesting new concepts to its policy: darkness and silence.
Because Winterswijk is so well documented, the rules (laws) protecting the defined qualities already existed as documents that had previously served both as a guideline for decisions at the town hall and as guidance for property owners. The Atlas enables the Winterswijk administration to upload these documents into the system, extract important sections, annotate them and create a comprehensive summary of each regulation, enriched with images and hyperlinks.
Solution
With its flexibility, versatility and performance, Structr proved to be the perfect tool for building the Atlas, taking into account APIs, user questions, guidelines and qualities.
The database design, created after just two days of intensive collaboration, was optimised several times, which reveals another special feature of the application platform: while IT projects usually lead to ever more complicated solutions over time, Structr stands out with ever simpler and at the same time extremely user-friendly solutions, including data maintenance.
The Atlas combines several highly innovative solutions to various problems that arise in the decision-making process of public administrations. One of them is the combination of existing geographic information with environmental quality measurements from various sources in order to derive regulations from them.
In addition, the Atlas enables citizens to explore and recognise the qualities of their surroundings, so that they can better understand the reasons behind the policy and the decisions of the administration.
One definition document and four months of development time. That says a lot about Structr: the tool, the methodology, the company and the people. We made the right choice.
Simplified access to data with a single click
Clear, transparent collection of rules
Central decision-making and information tool of the municipality of Winterswijk
Valuable information tool for farmers, entrepreneurs, consultants, politicians and tourists
Result and outlook
With the Atlas, we have created a tool that serves everyone: the citizens of the municipality of Winterswijk, farmers, entrepreneurs, consultants, politicians, tourists, … That this has already been recognised is shown by the fact that policy makers are increasingly interested in consulting the Atlas before giving answers. It is becoming clear that the Atlas will be an important central decision-making and information tool in the future.
The experience of Winterswijk shows that the Atlas could even become a general policy presentation tool for many other governments. The concept is now so well defined that any government could create its own Atlas within a few weeks.
Would you like to learn more about how Structr was used in this solution?
Feel free to contact us at any time on +49 800 / 78 78 287 or send us an email at contact@structr.com. Alternatively, use our contact form.
Christian Morgner
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