Assessment of Housing Needs Using GIS

Rosario in Argentina has different classes in terms of housing quality and access to physical and social infrastructure. To evaluate the needs of recently decentralized departments, utilization of new management tools is needed to analyze facilities and constraints. The GIS application can contribute to this assessment. It can serve public housing by revealing problematic areas and improving resource allocation, and so contributing effectively to the efficiency of housing efforts and determination of spatial inequalities associated with social infrastructure that afflict most deprived groups. It can also help estimate the apparent demand and compare it with the demand extracted from indicators. According to the assessment, the city of Rosario contains basic disparities within its internal parts. The combined application of extractive and apparent demand for housing shows that in some cases the indices suggest less than real demands, or ignore them altogether. The growth of demand for GIS tools and access to statistical data in digital form will improve and unite the assessments of the need for housing and its impacts on spatial inequalities.