A FIG Commission 3 Workshop on ‘Spatial Information for Management of Sustainable Urban Areas' was held in Mainz, Germany, from 2^nd to 4^th February 2009. A global economy facing its worst recession in decades introduces new aspects to urban management relating to restricted credit-financed economic activity, increased unemployment and a shortage of affordable housing. The difference from past economic crises is that the current one is global, and an emergency situation for humanity.

However, there is currently more reliable spatial information relating to social/legal, environmental and economic aspects, and advanced tools for urban-information capture and integration (various sensors, geoportals etc) allow us to deal more efficiently with emerging problems. This was the optimistic conclusion drawn from several of the workshop presentations.

However, also identified was the fact that many national survey and building regulations were too rigid, expensive and outdated. This led to the suppression of innovation in approach, products and services, and hindered the activity of the private sector. It also added a considerable and often unnecessary financial overhead to administration and raised the question of how appropriate government institutional arrangements were in this modern age, especially since such were designed sixty years ago and have not fundamentally changed since.

Several papers identified the enormous scale and expansion of slums and/or informal developments in urban areas. In Cairo, for example, a recent survey presented at the workshop estimated the problem to be five times greater than official figures suggest. It seems the biggest urban challenge facing us today is finding and applying effective solutions to the informal development explosion in our cities. This is a priority for Commission 3, and should be so for FIG.

This workshop was organised and sponsored by the German Association of Surveying - Society for Geodesy, Geoinformation and Land Management (DVW) and the Institute for Spatial Information and Surveying Technology of Mainz University of Applied Sciences, under the aegis of EARSeL, UNECE WPLA, Lantmäteriet, and the Appraisal Institute, USA. A total of 73 participants registered from 24 countries, and 55 papers were presented.

A follow-up high-level expert meeting of a limited number of invited participants is planned for the end of November 2009 in Paris. It will be organised by the French delegate to Commission 3, Rafic Khouri, and have as goal discussion with distinguished decision-makers about the emerging problems in specifically selected megacities, as well as finalisation of the context of Commission 3 publication Megacities Management.