What state is your mayor leaving your municipality in?

The Gemeenterapport is one of the most complex data projects we built at De Standaard. A single template generates 300 unique municipality profiles, each with their own mayor, statistics, map, photo gallery and comparison charts. The content is fully dynamic and conditional: a coastal municipality like Blankenberge gets different comparison groups and context than a central city like Ghent or a rural municipality like Boom.

At the top of each report sits a custom Python-generated map positioning the municipality within its province. Below that, an interactive D3 choropleth shows house prices per municipality. Comparison bars show how the municipality scores relative to the Flemish average on indicators like road safety, crime, poverty and aging. Each municipality also has a photo gallery with local images, scraped from public sources.

The data comes from the Gemeente- en Stadsmonitor of the Flemish government, supplemented with Statbel and other data. The conditional text generation, choosing the right comparison group, trend and context per municipality, was technically the most challenging part.