In our research, people are our focus. Everyone is included, from societal thought leaders to government policy-makers to high-level civil society advocates – through to entrepreneurs and citizens, including the disenfranchised. These people are our collaborators, our participants, our beneficiaries, our users. PLUS focuses on understanding the spatial information needs of society and responding to those needs in responsible ways – as tools, as systems, as infrastructure, or as ways of thinking. Our work sits at the nexus of urbanization, land tenure, governance, climate change, and transportation – and the grand challenges of sustainability and social equity in the age of the anthropocene.
At PLUS- Urban and Regional Futures, we contribute towards sustainable and equitable urban transformations. Our projects include sustainable revitalization of neighborhoods and energy poverty, sustainable accessibility, and contributing towards sustainability through urban densification strategies. We use mixed methods to elicit and co-produce knowledge from different actors on community well-being and urban quality-of-life. We aim at multi-scalar integrations of subjective perceptions and objective measures to monitor quality-of-life dimensions and inform policy-based decision making.
We excel in projects and research concerned with infrastructur(ing) provision, be it urban green in deprived areas, public spaces in marginalized communities, or thinking up resilient and sustainable infrastructures for an ever-changing world. One of our projects explores the Nature-Based Solutions web of nature in urban systems, another is looking into transportation and smart hubs.
We develop and apply strategic planning tools and methodologies that help us work towards our joint vision: empower society with specialized knowledge and expertise on spatial and temporal interactions between people, land and urban systems and facilitate the underlying governance processes to support inclusive planning and decision-making. Together with UN-Habitat, we have developed the Spatial Development Framework methodology that is now being rolled out in several African countries. We inquire how creative thinking can be supported in the design of spatial decision support systems and probe processes of digitalization in urban planning, including tools, processes, actors, participation modes and approaches to future thinking.
Our research incorporates combinations of data-driven innovative methods including Earth observation, geospatial information and Building Information Modelling (BIM) for Digital Twin creations. With Digital twins we are building historic, current representations of the built environment and simulating future scenarios for applications such as solar potential analysis, property valuation, overground and underground 3D data integration, disaster simulations, urban heat island investigation, and urban planning design scenarios among others.
Our projects take us around the world, from India's emergent urban formations, rural change, and economic transformations, to the informal economies and the creative kampungs in Indonesia (INECIS); from Peru, where we look into Geo-tech and water governance, to Mexico, where we explore the collaborative urban design of public spaces in marginalized urban communities using ICTs.
At PLUS we stand for People, Land and Urban Systems, and this is how we contribute to our urban and regional futures.
At PLUS - Responsible Land Administration and Information Modeling, we work towards resilient, equitable, and accountable land institutions and governance. Our projects deal with challenges of land consolidation and conflicts over land in settings where land rights are not always known, and where triggers such as natural disasters or armed conflicts, ask for timely responses. Our approaches often focus on Fit-For-Purposes solutions, in countries as diverse as Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, or Colombia. We strive for strengthening land institutions and education in our target countries, collaborating with local partners in the development of MOOCs, joint educational programs and e-learning platforms (e.g. Teaching Essential for Responsible Land Administration). Projects such as "Land@Scale" illustrate our commitment to responsible land administration.
Our work contributes towards our joint vision to empower society with specialized knowledge and expertise on spatial and temporal interactions between people, land tenure, land use, urban systems, and the underlying governance processes to support inclusive planning and decision-making. We excel in the use of geoinformation technologies for Land Administration. The H2020 European project “its4land”, which obtained the ”Geospatial World Innovation Award” in 2021, is clear evidence of the success of our efforts.
Our research explores innovative data acquisition sensors and platforms such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for fast, affordable, and highly accurate image-data sources. Following fit-for-purpose approaches aiming at fast recording of the 70 % of unmapped Worldwide areas, we investigate indirect land mapping methods incorporating innovative machine learning algorithms based on remotely sensed data combined with interactive functionalities to speed up the cadastral registration data. We investigate policies and requirements for fair property valuation and taxation systems in a variety of countries, including 3D and 4D aspects.
At PLUS we stand for People, Land and Urban Systems, and this is how we contribute to Responsible land administration and information modeling.
At PLUS - Governance of Risk, we are concerned with the nexus of natural hazards, climate change and vulnerability as drivers of complex, multi-hazard risks in human settlements. We explore how cities and regions could respond to the shocks that are or will likely affect them and investigate the impacts that these shocks and the envisaged responses may have on people and places. In projects, such as the Integrated Flood Management in Kampala, we explore how the outputs from spatial models of urban growth and dynamic hazard models can be used to create scenarios of future flood risk that inform collaborative decision making by involving residents of flood prone areas, civil society organizations and government authorities in identifying risk reduction strategies and measures to increase flood resilience.
Our work seeks to develop effective spatial development strategies and responses, pertaining to adaptation, mitigation and transformations that increase community and/or societal resilience. We explore these responses in fields such as transport and energy, but also by understanding how to build resilient urban communities (e.g., SES, Coolschools, BREUCOM), through our work in land consolidation for disaster resilience, or through the development of collaborative spatial planning tools to strengthen community engagement in highly sensitive adaptation measures that involve involuntary resettlement.
We are also contributing to a better understanding of the impacts associated with risks and disasters, for example in the HABITABLE project that investigates displacement due to climate change and migration in the African transition zone.
Our work contributes to PGM’s joint vision to empower society with specialized knowledge and expertise on spatial and temporal interactions between people, land tenure, land use, urban systems, the environment and the underlying governance processes to support inclusive planning and decision-making that builds community and societal resilience. We share our knowledge and expertise on the governance of risk through collaborations in the Centre for Disaster Resilience.
At PLUS we stand for People, Land and Urban Systems, and this is how we contribute towards Governance of Risk.
At PLUS - Geo-data Technologies and Methodologies, we critically evaluate, develop and apply tools, methods, and approaches that contribute towards our vision of empowering society with specialized knowledge and expertise on spatial and temporal interactions between people, land tenure, land use, urban systems, and the underlying governance processes to support inclusive planning and decision-making.
We collaborate across borders and institutions to develop planning support tools that bring together different sets of knowledge and know-how to better plan for the future of our cities and regions. Projects such as OGITO engage with the challenges of stakeholder participation and collaborative planning. We explore how institutionalization of Planning Support Systems happens, across multiple contexts and application fields.
Our staff is at the forefront of the development of methodologies for “missing spaces”. We are working with deprivation mapping using Spatial data, with Geospatial methods for mapping Slums and informal settlements, as in the IdeaMapSudan project, and collaborating with the United Nations in the development of a toolkit to make Earth observation data more accessible for local stakeholders, supporting local SDG 11 reporting, and to form a large network of users. This project was awarded with the Geo SDG 2021 Award for Collaboration on SDG Toolkit.
Our approach is driven by the ambition to further citizen science and community involvement. We see these as instrumental to develop more equitable cities and regions that are better prepared for a joint future. This commitment translates into the work we develop in our lab “Design and Interactive Space for Co-creating” (DISC), and in the collaboration with networks and groups such as the Integrated Disaster Risk Management Society, and with Data4Human Rights.
By encouraging an engagement with critical geo-data studies we engage with the political and social impacts of large geo-information infrastructures underpinning new spatial research practices. This includes a focus on Geo-data ethics. Projects such as Do No Harm, explore how basic ethics principles like ‘do no harm’ are transformed in light of new geospatial technologies like GeoAI. Our commitment to ethics means that we facilitate sustainable geospatial data ecosystems and support efforts to make spatial and non-spatial data available to students, researchers, and external collaborators (via, for example, CRIB).
At PLUS we stand for People, Land and Urban Systems, and this is how we contribute towards Critical geo-data technologies and methodologies.
The research group carrying out the projects in the PLUS research theme include staff members of ITC and graduate students, some of whom carry out their research in sandwich constructions with partner universities or research organisations.
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