Currently, new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are perceived to offer various opportunities for substantial change in the way government is organized. New ICTs, for instance, make it possible for governments to organize relationships with their environment to an increasing extent regardless of time and of geographic location. The latter effect of ICT applications is referred to, in many recent scientific publications and policy documents, as a process of “deterritorialization”. This phenomenon is broadly acknowledged to occur, although systematic analysis of its characteristics and/or its extent usually cannot be found. A specific type of current ICTs that seem to enforce this acknowledged development of deterritorialization, is Geographic Information Systems (GISs). Generally, GISs can facilitate the coordination and integration of government activities related to geographic data, which traditionally take place within specific policy sectors or geographic areas. In the Netherlands, the opportunities for governments offered by new ICTs like GISs, match the objectives of recent reform programs, i.e. to create new metropolitan governments through a restructuring of authorities and administrations of the various local governments and special districts located within the broader metropolitan area. One of the metropolitan regions in which such a reform initiative has been taken is the broader metropolitan area of the City of Amsterdam. This reform initiative has been the reason for the joint local governments in that area to participate in a project to establish a GIS application for the Amsterdam region. In this contribution, we want to explore how and to what extent a GIS-application may actually bring about coordination and integration of activities of different local governments, so that a different administrative level or even a different kind of administration will be realized. Furthermore, we want to study the way in which GIS applications actually affect the traditional notion of territory as related to government activities. With that, we want to investigate the empirical meaning of the concept of deterritorialization and explore its usefulness for the study of changes in government organizations as a result of ICT developments. For these reasons, we will look at experiences with the development and implementation of GIS in the Amsterdam region. Data have been collected through interviews and a document study. The central question of this contribution then can be described as follows:
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