The City of Havana was founded in the early 16th century. It treasures up a
remarkable heritage of urban and architectural monuments located in its Historical
Centre, which has an area of 2.1 square kilometres and a total of 3.500 buildings,
the seventh part of which is considered to be of great historical value. The
Historical Centre was declared a World Cultural Heritage site in 1982. The City
Historian’s Office (CHO) was founded in 1938, as a pioneer institution in the
transformation of heritage preservation and defence of the national identity. Over
the last ten years, the CHO has developed and implemented a very novel management
pattern. Human resources have been trained and an organizational structure with
specific divisions and a managerial system have been created and consolidated. This
structure was developed to conduct a process covering strategically integrated
environmental planning – (including the economy-society-territory-habitat) – to the
physical recovery of buildings and urban spaces. In this complex rehabilitation work,
GIS applications play a key role as support in the decision-making process, in the
development of public e-service applications and in the promotion and dissemination
of the main historical and heritage values. The development of web-based open source
GIS applications are very suitable alternatives to reduce costs and to
guarantee a rapid development and deployment of applications. This presentation shows
the GIS application development strategy, as well as its main characteristics and
results. This work was supported by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
(SDC).