Researchers in Residence: Looking to the Future of Urban Planning

Introduction

Our Researchers in Residence activity is part of our Academic Engagement Programme and develops new collaborations through research visits/residencies for university academics to spend time embedded within the Catapult teams to build stronger partnerships in the national innovation system and supporting the best environment for innovation, such as urban planning research.

This project is being undertaken by Suvodeep Mazumdar from University of Sheffield and focuses on Mapping and Exploring Large-scale Knowledge Graphs for Urban Planning.

Background

With our city populations predicted to rise significantly over the coming decades, planning for new homes and other infrastructure in an efficient way will become an increasingly important and inclusive process. To ensure urban planners and developers make well-informed decisions on how to use land for development, they need to be able to visualise important data about a city and the changes it is likely to undergo and conduct the urban planning research.

New digital tools and improved data could help to make the housing and land market fairer, and more efficient and transparent.

Solution

In its first phase, this urban planning research project will aim to understand the potential of digital solutions and new innovations in urban planning via a series of workshops, interviews, walkthroughs and shadowing sessions. This will help identify relevant datasets and elicit requirements for outcome measures and end-user technologies which are needed to put potential solutions into action.

In its next stage, the project will prototype low-cost sensing (IoT, wearables, mobile, crowdsourcing etc.) and data processing solutions to enrich proprietary and open datasets in urban environments.

The combination and linking of this information with the outcomes of the first urban planning research project phase will enable the development of a linked knowledge graph with semantic formalisms and embedded logic. The tool can help planners identify innovations and solutions which could support the planning process in any given situation or environment.

Get in touch

Please contact nick.woodward@cp.catapult.org.uk for further information about any of the researchers we are currently working with or find out more about our Researchers in Residence programme here.