Bowman, Franklin Charles, December 1981 - THE USE OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS IN URBAN PLANNING AND ADMINISTRATION; THE PINELLAS COUNTY DATA BANK SURVEY PROJECT AS EXAMPLE Abstract: The public planners and administrators in the large urban centers of America are required to make decisions that impact on the lives of millions of people and involve the spending of billions of tax dollars. With the needs and problems of contemporary urban society growing in complexity and number, and with the costs of addressing them continually becoming more expensive, the urban decision makers are in need of large amounts of information upon which to base their decisions, thereby shaping the future of our urban environments. This paper discusses the utilization of automated urban information systems to assist the governmental decision makers in this task, and emphasize the appropriateness of the anthropological perspective and the use of applied anthropologists in implementing systems for increased understanding of the total urban environment. The anthropologist's holistic approach to understanding the culture of our urban centers facilitated by the use of computerized information systems, is argued to be a preferred approach to the urban decision maker's problems. The paper goes on to describe one effort to develop the seeds of an urban information system in Pinellas County, Florida, the "Data sank Survey Project". From November, 1977, through June, 1978, a large scale door-to-door survey was conducted under the administration of the University of South Florida's Human Resources Institute, utilizing participants hired under Title VI of the CETA program. The Survey collected demographic, attitudinal, and citizen needs data from a 30,000 household sample of the County's population. This sample represented 20% of the total households in the County and was statistically very powerful. This paper describes the structure and processes involved in developing and conducting the survey. The use of the survey data organized and accessed through an urban information system based on a geocoding system is discussed. The benefits of using such a system in making the decisions required in governing an urban community and the steps in establishing such a system are outlined. .