Discover how the Municipal Planning Office in Łódź used the FME Platform to automate notifications about spatial development plan changes for the city’s residents.
About Our Client
The Municipal Planning Office in Łódź (Miejska Pracownia Urbanistyczna – MPU) is a budgetary unit of the Łódź City Hall, responsible for analytical and design tasks. Established in 2006, it focuses on preparing planning documents and conducting spatial analyses.
The main responsibilities of MPU include:
- Developing the city’s General Plan and preparing future updates to this document.
- Preparing Local Spatial Development Plans (Miejscowe Plany Zagospodarowania Przestrzennego – MPZP) for Łódź and managing amendments to existing plans.
Contents:
Challenges
An amendment to the Act on spatial planning and land development, along with related legal regulations, introduced a requirement for local governments to keep residents informed about all updates published in the Public Information Bulletin (Biuletyn Informacji Publicznej – BIP).
For the Municipal Planning Office in Łódź, this meant regularly sharing information about progress in planning procedures related to both the Local Spatial Development Plans and the General Plan.
Following these legislative changes, many Łódź residents sought updates on ongoing planning activities so they could take an active role in shaping their local environment.
However, processing these requests manually turned out to be too time-consuming and burdensome for staff. Each update had to be checked on the MPU website, and every applicant informed individually.
To address this, MPU identified the need for an automated urban planning newsletter that would streamline the entire process and ease the workload of its project teams.
Solution
Using FME Form, the MPU developed a process that automates the handling of requests related to the Local Spatial Development Plans (MPZP) and the General Plan.
The system:
Checks for recent updates on the MPU website,
Analyzes incoming requests from residents, determining whether they concern MPZP, the General Plan, or both,
Matches the specified area with the corresponding plan boundaries,
Uses Python scripts to retrieve information about modifications and send a personalized message to each applicant.
If a change has occurred within the past 24 hours, the resident automatically receives a personalized message containing the plan number, relevant area, and a link to the plan’s webpage.
All messages are sent automatically, while the MPU team receives confirmation that the data verification and notification process has completed successfully.
When larger volumes of messages need to be sent, the system delivers them in batches.
Thanks to this solution, staff no longer need to spend time manually analyzing updates to spatial development plans or crafting individual messages for residents. The entire process of verifying data, preparing responses, and sending notifications has been reduced to just a few minutes.
Why MPU Łódź Chose the FME Platform
MPU had already been using FME to automate other processes.
The platform’s wide range of tools, ease of use, and intuitive interface made it possible to design a solution perfectly tailored to the Office’s needs.
Because of FME’s flexibility, MPU did not need to modify its website or implement any new tools. These steps would have been time-consuming and challenging for a local government unit operating within a limited budget.
Results and Benefits
FME analyzes the following number of pages daily for MPU to provide residents with up-to-date information:
100
subpages related to local development plans currently in progress
200
active plans
a page for the General Plan
currently under development
Thanks to the automation introduced with FME, MPU can now process a wide variety of requests—ranging from those concerning individual parcels to entire neighborhoods—in just a few minutes.
Each day, several personalized newsletters are automatically delivered, requiring no manual involvement from staff.
FME has enabled MPU to:
Cut response times from many hours to just a few minutes,
Reduce workload for both project and IT teams,
Provide Łódź residents with faster and easier access to planning information.
The FME platform has become indispensable in our daily work at the Municipal Planning Office in Łódź.
The automated workflows we’ve developed have enabled full process automation and significantly accelerated our daily tasks.
Working with data has become simpler and more intuitive than ever before. The variety of available tools and their ease of use make FME the key pillar of data processing and analysis at MPU Łódź.
Adam Manista
Senior GIS Specialist, MPU Łódź
The support we receive from Globema is extremely valuable. The company provides us with specialized training that helps us develop new skills and identify areas for improvement.
Our long‑term collaboration with Globema has consistently been of the highest quality, and we can always rely on their support.
Sonia Dimitrowa
Senior GIS Specialist, MPU Łódź
Further Collaboration
The Municipal Planning Office in Łódź has been using FME for spatial data processing and analysis for many years and continues to plan new projects leveraging the platform. Upcoming initiatives include:
Rebuilding the PlanInfo application
The redevelopment—featuring a new application engine—aims to improve existing processes and introduce new functionalities to the system.
Analyzing resident submissions
As MPU works on the city’s new General Plan, it plans to use FME to process and analyze comments submitted by residents so that this feedback can be incorporated into the final document.
Developing an Urban Monitoring Service
This new service will provide insights into the city’s current state. Data will be collected and integrated across GIS systems, while planned tools will enable automatic updating, management, and backup of all collected information by system users.
Our forward-looking approach cannot be separated from FME, which has greatly simplified and accelerated our work.
Analyses that once had to be done manually and took considerable time have now been automated through FME processes, allowing us to complete them in just a few minutes.
Adam Manista
Senior GIS Specialist, MPU Łódź
Want to achieve similar results?
Find out how FME can benefit your organization. Fill out the form, and our consultant will contact you to discuss your needs and arrange a live system demo.
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fme@globema.pl
+ 48 22 848 73 13
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