Clyde Mission: innovation in digital mapping
Picture This: Innovation in Digital Mapping
Clyde Mission has a grand challenge of making the Clyde an engine of sustainable and inclusive growth for Glasgow, the City Region, and Scotland. The footprint for this work (the length of the river, and around 500m either side) contains around 170,000 people, 9,195 business sites, and some 110 miles of river.
How to make sense of it all? Visualising some of the data that illustrates the region’s complexity and opportunity was an important step for the Clyde Mission team.
This mapping is now available to the public here: Clyde Mission Data Viewer
Designed and developed in-house by the Scottish Government Digital Planning team, the Clyde Mission map is designed to help people access geographic data in a more intuitive way. Rather than looking at datasets in isolation, or across multiple platforms, the map allows the viewer to layer various data sets relating to the Clyde Mission footprint in one place.
The tool collates data from a wide range of online sources, bringing everything together into one place and making it easy to access. For example, the data viewer can be used to identify areas of vacant and derelict land (even giving an idea of how much work would be needed to bring that land back into use), and presents these sites alongside other useful information, like broadband access within the area, greenspace, heat clusters, planning applications, transport nodes, as well as socio-economic information such as Scotland’s Index of Multiple Deprivation.
Layering data offers the opportunity to explore prospects for land use, investment and spatial/community planning. With this capability, viewers can explore and better understand the Clyde Mission area, whether they be residents, businesses or investors.
We will continue to look at opportunities to add more layers of useful information as work progresses on Clyde Mission, and welcome feedback on ways we could add to or improve the map, or ways in which it has been used (clydemission@gov.scot).
Creating the data viewer
The data viewer is the result of a collaboration between Clyde Mission and Digital Planning.
The Digital Planning programme is working towards the delivery of new services and systems, putting data and technology at the heart of planning. The Clyde Mission data viewer is just one example of this approach, unlocking planning data and supporting better place-based decision making.
Note: Links to the original sources for all of the data used are available within the data viewer.