Monitoring urban development: National register of investment locations as a tool for sustainable urban land use management in serbia

Abstract

A stalled urbanization process in Serbia is an obstacle to the national economic growth. One of the reasons for that is a poor local economic development, which is caused also by the lack of efficient urban land management system in Serbia. Thus, in order to encourage sustainable urban development, local self-governments in Serbia need a new model of sustainable urban planning and urban land management that should include market-based instruments, like, investments, required for the urban renewal process triggering. Aiming to underpin this strategic ambitious, Serbian Ministry of construction, transport and infrastructure, Republic geodetic authority and Swedish partners are implementing a Project “Improvement of Investment Environment in Serbia” in order to establish a National Register of Investment Locations (NRIL) and related monitoring system, which would improve efficiency and effectiveness of decision-making process for the investment locations and urban land use management in general within 11 pilot local self-governments. Building of this register and its monitoring system would include development of an investment location data model, centralized database and 3 Web-based applications for the investment-related data collection and their interactive visualization using the Serbian National Spatial Data Infrastructure framework and advantages of its geoportal Geosrbija. Also, to increase the role of Serbian cities and strengthen corrective function of the urban plans and urban planning in general, one of the Project objectives is to provide a direct communication channel between the potential investors and local self-governments. Finally, it is expected that the Project results would be implemented in the other local self-governments in Serbia as well, and that they would contribute to the goals achievement of a recently adopted national Sustainable Urban Development Strategy 2030, as well as to some other strategic projects and initiatives launching in Serbia.