Bahrain Parks Cloud Platform: Live Suit of Tools for Planning, Designing, and Managing Public Parks

The paper introduces an open source cloud platform for the efficient, knowledge-based, sustainable and inclusive development of urban parks - Bahrain Parks developed at the University of Bahrain. We describe the local context at the genesis of the initiative, its components, the rationale for the creation of a comprehensive, live, database, and the suite of web applications that deliver information to different audiences from professionals to the general public. We describe the data structure on MySQL hosting and the development of both backend and frontend in R Shiny, and the various web applications and how these leverage the data to useful information for supporting decision-making on park maintenance, planning, and design. We describe the technologies used. We share findings regarding the official acceptance and attempts to integrate the application in workflows at several agencies. We argue that the project belongs to the sphere of e-governance. To our knowledge, the project is unique as it is being developed to incorporate an evidence-based design process, comprehensively. Furthermore, it embeds explicit and implicit public participation in decision-making, through park rating and usage.