The choice of our international partners is based on several factors. First, local capacity is a critical factor in the case of Shanghai. The Open Research Laboratory of Remote Sensing of the East China Normal University has been very active and experienced in GIS research. Professor Jianping Wu, the key contact, has hoped that this collaborative effort would bring their research on par with international standards and help develop better analytical tools for monitoring urban changes. Second, in the case of Guatemala City, we have relied on an established relationship between the two units of University of San Carlos of Guatemala and our department (through our research assistant, Ms. Irayda Ruiz).

Collaboration with our partners has been accomplished by several on-site visits, regular communication via e-mail during the project, use of the file transfer protocol for exchanging data between VCU and the partner universities, and on-site GIS training to Guatemala partners.

Dr. Wu visited East China Normal University first at the end of December 2000 and then in July 2001. During the two visits, Dr. Wu had extensive discussion with Prof. Jianping Wu to identify sub-city indicators appropriate for Shanghai, verify data and map availability, discuss the general framework of the training module, and explore ways in which our research efforts may become more relevant to local policy-making.

We also met with the Director of the Comprehensive Planning Division of the Shanghai Urban Planning Institute, the municipal authority responsible for drafting city and district level plans and advising on planning policies. The purpose of the meeting was to better understand the needs by municipal planning agencies for spatial information and to explore ways in which our research efforts may become more relevant to local policy-making. Based on the needs of her agency, she pointed out that our project could be most relevant if it can provide a reliable system of empirical evidence and she provided the following priorities:

• Demographic trends and comparative analysis by subdistrict

• Land use trends and historical patterns

• Industrial establishments, employment, and land consumption

• Commercial establishment and employment, and relationship with population distribution

• Demographic characteristics, geographical distribution, and employment patterns of temporary migrants

Dr. Rugg and Ms. Irayda Ruiz visited the University of San Carlos of Guatemala in February 2001 and met with our collaborators in both the Center for Urban and Regional Studies and Faculty of Architecture. We presented the Richmond Urban Indicators project to showcase the potential of indicator research, offered an introductory workshop on ArcView, identified human and hardware capabilities of our partners in Guatemala, and made contact with the Municipal Planning Department of Guatemala City. More importantly, we assisted both teams in the definition and selection of most relevant data available, matching the list provided by the United Nations (UN) global urban observatory.

During the months of July and August 2001, Ms. Irayda Ruiz visited Guatemala again. She met with the partner research teams for discussions about map design and neighborhood boundary definition, and assisted the teams in defining an adequate format for spreadsheets to be used in ArcView maps. She also helped with the installation of ArcView and a CDRW supplied by the VCU team, and provided training to use the system. In addition, she provided training to define some basic criteria for thematic map design, joining tables, and other GIS basics (the use of point, line and polygons to present data and how to handle discrepancies between one census variable display and another).

In October 2001, Prof. Carlos Ayala, Coordinator of the Research Institute of Architecture in the Faculty of Architecture at University of San Carlos visited VCU. The research team had further discussions with him about district boundary definitions for census data in Guatemala City, digitalization of maps at the subdistrict level for the central business district, and analytical methods to be used in future research. We reached some tentative agreements that we would work towards building projection models for service delivery, particularly to squatter settlements, and towards monitoring land use and environmental changes in the metropolitan area.

As a result of these exchanges, the collaborative relationships with our international partners have strengthened significantly. We are confident such relationships will continue and benefit future research. In the case of Guatemala City, our partnership has evolved into an institutional research exchange program between VCU and the Faculty of Architecture of the University of San Carlos, beyond the scope of this research. Our efforts in transferring indicator research and GIS mapping expertise also have contributed to the building of local capacity. In the case of Shanghai, we are about to make our research available to local planning policy-makers. Our research efforts in bringing sion-making process.

Together information from diverse sources are likely to help them overcome the lack of coherent and consistent data in their decicion-making process.

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