Urban observatories, tools for monitoring cities

Abstract

The growth of urban areas, and all the problems that this fact entails, make more immediate the need to search for tools that are able to assist urban management. The urban observatories are, then, a tool that through indicators allows monitoring of the cities, assessing their progress over time. The observatories are also important to support decision making, involvement of people in decisions, data analysis and compilation and availability of data, which were previously unavailable to the general public. This paper makes a synthesis of the literature on the theme of Urban Observatories as a tool for monitoring our cities, with the objective to serve as a theoretical basis for the possible implementation of a project of this kind in Portugal.