A City For All - Citizens And Families

Summary

Launched in 2015 by the City of Repentigny, the initiative My Municipal Services uses a web application of interactive mapping to improve the quality of life and to foster the integration and participation of the citizens in the life of the community. It facilitates access to a wide range of information on the services provided by the municipality according to the specific place of residence of the citizens.

Background and Objective

The city of Repentigny has a population of 85,000 people. Over the years, the municipality has been keen to improve the quality and diversify the services offered to the citizens. This contributes to the attractiveness of our territory and to the quality of the living environment. A challenge has been to provide to the citizens an easy access to all the relevant and up to date information on the municipal programs and activities. This is in our view an essential condition to foster social integration and civic participation and to develop a sense of belonging to the community. New technologies, in particular interactive mapping and geographic information systems,were an opportunity to innovate in this regard and to develop a unique model to facilitate for the citizens access to information, behind the traditional tools used by local governments (newsletters, information phones lines, E-mails or Web sites). It is a central element of the smart cities concept. This information is also disseminated on the open data site of the Quebec government in order to facilitate even more the access to information which is particularly useful for the development of new applications and for the civil society in general. The goal of the project was to develop a user-friendly web application that would provide the citizens the possibility to access a range of timely information according to their specific place of residence. This involved a redefinition of the information management process of the municipality to adapt it to a webservice base and to pull together all the relevant data already in the different corporation information systems of the municipality. The information provided through the web application was intended to facilitate the daily life of the citizens. It included for example the schedules in each neighborhood of the different waste collections (garbage, selected, organic, bulky material and branches). It also indicated the location and opening hours of municipal offices (City Hall, other municipal offices, libraries, municipal court, police station, fire halls, etc.) and how to get there from the location of the residence and how to access additional information through specific E-mail connections and Web sites. At the same time, My Municipal Services has proven to be an essential tool used by the employees of the City who are receiving requests for information from the citizens by phone, E-Mail or in person. They frequently rely on MMS to give reliable information to the citizens. The My Municipal Services innovative initiative provided an opportunity for the City ofRepentigny to extend on the same basis the information available to families through a new project called the Family Map. With the same configuration, the application gives access to a range of information on recreational and sports activities, aquatic center, skate plaza, cycling network, parks and green spaces, community organizations, nurseries, schools and special events. It includes also information on activities in the libraries, the Crealab and the arts center of the municipality. This initiative was developed in close partnership with Esri Canada, a firm that provides world-class enterprise geographic information system (GIS)solutions.My Municipal Services application leverages ArcGIS Online and Esri Canada’s ArcGIS for Canadian Municipalities, a series of comprehensive and configurable applications built on a harmonized Canadian Municipal Data Model and the ArcGIS API for JavaScript. It also uses a base map created through the Community Maps Program. The geomatics and information system division of the City of Repentigny was put in place in 2011. Its annual operational budget is around $500,000. Its four employees are all geomatics specialists and they include a manager, two analysts and one technician.

Actions and Implementation

New technologies, in particular in the field of geomatics and geographic information system, make it possible for cities to develop innovative approaches to reach out to their residents and provide information on municipal services. Already, two other Canadian municipalities have replicated and adapted the innovative model develop by the City of Repentigny. A video presenting My Municipal Services is available on YouTube. The City of Repentigny and its partner, Esri Canada, would be glad to share this experience with local authorities in the different regions of the world.

Outcomes and Impacts

The application My Municipal Services has generated strong interest among the residents of Repentigny. Since the beginning of 2017 for example, an average of more than 1,500 pages have been consulted each month, for a total of more than 28,000 pages. The average time of consultation is two minutes per page. The months from May to August are the busiest ones and they correspond to the period during which most of the some 1 500 new households move to the city each year. The Family Map application has generated between 100 and 400 visits each month, a peak of 1,000 having been reached in June 2018. Monthly statistics on the access to the applications are compiled by the communication service which is in charge of the Web site of the municipality. The municipal communication service uses periodically different tools to promote the application in the media and to the population. This initiative is part of the broad vision of the City of Repentigny to continue to develop an inclusive city at a human scale and to table on innovation, creativity and new technologies to achieve this goal. We are one of the leading municipalities in this regard in the metropolitan Montreal area and throughout the province of Quebec. The City has received recognition from the information technology industry for the project My Municipal Services. It received in 2016 an OCTAS award from the IT ACTION Network, which recognizes organizations for their creativity, vitality and exceptional contribution to the growth of the information technology industry in the province of Quebec.

Sustainability and Scalability

Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable Target 3: Participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management

Innovative Initiative

The City of Repentigny has revolutionized the way municipalities reach out to their residents and provide information on municipal services. It links the citizen with specific information in accordance to the location of its residence and it provides mapping information on how and when to access municipal offices, services and activities. My Municipal Services application has been the first one of this type developed at the municipal level in Canada. It is a powerful tool to foster the integration of newcomers to city and to foster civic participation by all the citizens. It helps municipal employees to give better services to the residents. It creates proximity between the municipal services and the population. It is both flexible and adaptable. Two other Canadian municipalities, the City Longueil (240,000 people) and the City of Sherbrooke (160 000 people), have replicated and adapted recently this innovative initiative developed by the City of Repentigny. My Municipal Services initiative has been launched in 2015 and since then the content of the information has been gradually expanded. The application is updated as soon as changes are brought in service delivery by the municipality. A new application for families, the Family Map, has been developed on the same basis. It provides useful and reliable information on a wide range of recreational, sports and cultural activities as well as on special events. Information on community organizations, nurseries and schools is also available through the application. There was a large support throughout the municipal organization for this innovative initiative. In order to resolve any technical problem and to ensure the coherence and reliability of the information, the expertise of a specialized resource is required in the geomatics and information system division of the municipality.

Resources devoted to delivery

BASIC CITY DATA Population size: 84,965 Population growth rate (%): 11.00 Surface area (sq.km): 71.25 Population density (people/sq.km): 1,192.50 GDP per capita (USD): 19,360.00 Main source of prosperity: Industry, services, creative industry, tourism and culture guangzhouaward.org/a/930.html?lang=en