Urban planning plays an important role in the local development process that is
carrying out in the Historical Centre of Havana, Cuba. This process is headed by the
Office of the City Historian. A methodological management and information control and
coordination center was established in 1994 under the name of Master Plan in order to
study, on various scales, the Historic Center’s problems and its fortifications, and
issue the most appropriate strategies for their recovery. The information was divided
into a number of Topics like: Cadastre, Architectural Inventory, Land Use, Population
and Housing Census, Historical Evolution, Imagery, Land Management, Territorial
Control, Urban Regulation, Cartography and Documentary Reference. To perform its
functions, the Master Plan constantly needs to manage -consult, update, develop and
discard- huge amounts of information which had been filed separately so far, leading
to a delayed and complex work process. It is with this view in mind, that we have
developed a web-based GIS application on the basis of comfortable and efficient
interfaces which thus contribute to facilitating and centralizing our work. In this
presentation, the application development process and main characteristics of
web-based GIS application for urban planning are presented.This work was supported by
the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).