The City of Venice has been a unique tourism destination for decades and has attracted thousands of visitors every year coming for various purposes (leisure, restoration, business, etc.). Particularly important to Venice is its reputation for being the “City of Water,” but this legacy also involves challenges. The city is constantly under the threat of degradation caused by salty lagoon water that flood into the city in certain times of the year. At this point, urban maintenance of city elements is essential to ensure minimum functional levels of city infrastructure. The system introduced in this chapter is an Urban Geospatial Maintenance System designed for Venice that focuses on planning and execution of maintenance work and is based on the logic of integration of classical management concepts and Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) concepts.
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The rapid development of Information and Communication Technologies plays a major role in the improvement of planning processes and utilization of resources in urban infrastructures management (Huang, 2003; Hamilton, Burns, et al., 2005; Hamilton, Wang, et al., 2005; Wang etal., 2007). However, the integration of new technologies stands as a big challenge for urban managers and engineers (Huber, 1990; Pierre et al., 2001a, 2001b; Quintero et al., 2005). Because the planning, design and operation of a complex urban system such as a city requires a complex information system in order to perform these operations with prospective success level. Today, public administrations have to integrate a wide range of data such as design data, maintenance data or geographic information from different sources and utilize these data in an operation of an urban infrastructure with minimum level of data loss or duplicity (Quintero et al., 2005) and maximum level of precision, consistency and integrity (Michele & Daniela, 2011). In addition to data, the service quality, financial status, time management, feasibility are some of the other aspects that have to be considered while realizing daily operations of an urban territory.