This report describes the first-phase work of the Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS). The two study cities are Shanghai, China, and Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Project goals

The chief objective of our project is to develop sub-city urban indicators for Shanghai, China, and Guatemala City, Guatemala, both participants in the Urban Indicators Program of the United Nations Center for Human Settlements (UNCHS). Through the project, we have cultivated close partnerships with East China Normal University in Shanghai (Open Research Laboratory of Remote Sensing) and University of San Carlos of Guatemala in Guatemala City (Center for Urban and Regional Studies and Faculty of Architecture).

Our project goals in the first phase of the project (January 2001 _ February 2002) include:

• develop long-term collaboration with international partners and transfer expertise in evaluating urban indicators to help build local capacity;

• design base maps to support display of indicator data at appropriate sub-city resolutions;

• establish a baseline set of indicators feasible for each partner city to enable continuing collection;

• assemble and disaggregate, where possible, existing indicators to describe sub-city areas of each partner city;

• design a database capable of maintaining historical data, supporting future updating, and adding new indicator data items;

• develop procedures for ongoing data collection and management to support future longitudinal studies as well as policy evaluations; and develop web publishing tools and training materials.

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