LJUBLJANA
CITY AND URBAN PLANNING

Capital since 1991 of the newly created Republic of Slovenia, Ljubljana has managed to successfully become a nice modern urban center, where currently reside approximately 270,000 inhabitants. It hosts the headquarters of the Slovenian government and it's largest industry, economic and cultural centre of the country. To its development over the last twenty years, have participated, among others, institutions such as the Urbanistični Institut (Urban Institute), whose task is to plan and balance the growth of different urban and rural areas of the country. Since 2008 and under the European Human Cities project, the institute collaborates with the Politecnico in Milan, The Lighthouse in Glasgow and Pro Materia and La Cambre Horta in Brussels in a study focused on improving the quality of public spaces in the contemporary cities. Among the results of this project there has been the Human Cities Festival, which took place in 2010 in Brussels and produced, among other activities, an exhibition, a symposium of experts, workshops and the publication of a book. The contribution of the Urbanistični Institut in this project has focused on the study of GIS maps, whose peculiarity is to analyze the behavior of the users of public spaces and use this information to improve the design of these spaces and of the urban structure in general. A few weeks from this years' edition of the festival, Barbara Goličnik, landscape architect in the Urbanistični Institute, explains in this interview the development of GIS maps from its beginnings to the results applied recently in the festival.