Introduction
Buildings are where we spend most of our lives and most of our money, and where enormous potential for energy and waste reduction lies. The building stock is also a city’s most significant socio-cultural and economic resource and its largest capital asset.
In order to improve the quality, efficiency, sustainability and resilience of building stocks, and to help meet net zero goals, comprehensive spatial data on the composition, operation and dynamic behaviour of all buildings is now required. However, in many countries such data are extremely difficult to obtain; being often highly fragmented, restricted, missing and/or only available in aggregated form. This is severely hampering efforts by those involved in diverse areas of building research to work collaboratively, within and across countries, to help meet national sustainability targets and UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP) sets out to address this problem. Our research-led initiative develops open-source code to support an international network of low maintenance open data platforms, managed by academia, providing standardised microspatial data on building stocks, at building level.
CCRP platforms are specifically designed to support research into the impact of buildings on the operation and performance of urban areas, in social cultural, economic and environmental terms. For this building level spatial data are needed at local, regional, national and international scale. Questions we ask include: How many buildings with similar characteristics are there? Where are they located, and why? How repairable, adaptable, long lasting and energy efficient are specific typologies? What is the relationship between building and street characteristics, the health and well-being of communities, and the economic prosperity of urban areas? And how similar or different are findings across towns, cities and countries, and what patterns and cycles can be seen persisting over time and space?
The CCRP network helps researchers to quickly compare building attribute and infrastructure datasets across geographic areas, and aids collaborative working to support sustainable and resilience goals. The scale, standardisation and geographic reach of CCRP data also offers opportunities for new insights to be gained using AI and ML, into the stock as a dynamic system, and into patterns that reveal underlying rules and cycles affecting its operation.
The CCRP looks to advance a more inclusive, efficient, whole-of-society approach to knowledge sharing on buildings and the physical structure of cities, allowing for permanent open databases, managed by academia, to be maintained and enriched, year-on-year, with the help of government, industry, the voluntary sector, and citizens. The Colouring Cities model has been built and tested since 2016 using a step-by-step collaborative approach. Initial work on the Colouring London prototype at University College London involved two hundred consultees across science, the humanities and the arts. In 2020 the initiative moved to The Alan Turing Institute where the Colouring Cities Research Programme was set up in order to support international academic institutions wishing to reproduce and co-work on Colouring Cities code. We currently collaborate with over 60 wonderful academics across an increasing number of countries who all contribute in-kind time as part of existing research programmes.
Current CCRP international academic partners are as follows: The University of New South Wales (Colouring Australia), The University of Bahrain & the Bahrain Authority for Culture and Antiquities (Colouring Bahrain) ; CERC Concordia University (Colouring Canada).;The American University of Beirut (Colouring Lebanon); The Leibniz Institute for Ecological Urban and Regional Development (Colouring Germany); The National Technical University of Athens (Colouring Greece); King’s College London & the Institut Teknologi Bandung (Colouring Indonesia), The Universidad Distrital – Francisco Jose de Caldas, Department of Cadastral and Geodesy Engineering (Colouring Colombia) and Mälardalen University (Colouring Sweden); The Perelman School of Medicine (Neuroaesthetics) at the University of Pennsylvania; The Austrian Institute of Technology, EPFL Lausanne, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (US) are also kindly supporting specific areas of CCRP research.
The original Colouring London prototype is currently being expanded to become Colouring Britain, with The East Midlands prototype being developed by Loughborough University as a CCRP model for networked regional university hubs co-working to maximise data coverage and data quality at national scale. We are grateful to the following organisations which include those that supporting the development of Colouring London with funding, encouragement and advice, free resources and/or case study write ups. Thanks go to: Ordnance Survey, Historic England, The Greater London Authority, The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, The Royal Institute of British Architects (British Architectural Library), The British Geological Survey, The Building Research Establishment Trust (BRE), The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), The Centre for Digital Built Britain (University Of Cambridge), University of Oxford, University College London, the University of Birmingham, Newcastle University, the Wildlife Trusts, The Royal Society of Arts, The Survey of London, the National Library of Scotland, Yale University Press (Pevsner Guides), The Institute of Historical Research (The Victoria County History), The Georgian Group, Victorian Society, The 20th century Society, The Association for Studies in the Conservation of Historic Buildings (ASCHB), The Institute of Historic Building Conservation (IHBC) and the Open Data Institute.
Explaining the science
Colouring Cities platforms are web-based open data visualisation platforms and databases that contains building footprints for every building in the city. These are used as mini filing cabinets to store, collate, collect, generate, verify and visualise data.
To capture, collate and promote knowledge sharing on buildings, when knowledge is highly fragmented and held by diverse stakeholders (e.g. by citizens, government departments and professional bodies etc), platforms need to be highly visual and to use a number of data capture techniques.
Each map acts as a giant jigsaw puzzle, relating to a specific aspect of the city’s stock, able to be gradually pieced together by colouring buildings in. Colouring is done by academic collation and upload of existing open datasets, by live streaming of official datasets, by generating new large-scale datasets (quickly and cheaply) using a variety of computational approaches, and by crowdsourcing knowledge at local level from citizens and other experts.
Computational approaches can be used to generate large-scale datasets very quickly by inferring one building characteristic from another, based on expert knowledge of the way parts of a building relate (e.g. the size and shape of a building’s footprint plus the building’s age can be used to infer materials, construction system, roof shape etc.). To maximise data reliability, and to allow researchers to test the accuracy of their algorithms, feedback loops are created between computational approaches, moderated bulk uploads, live streaming, and crowdsourcing at building level.
Colouring Cities platforms also have the capacity to operate as digital twins, mimicking change within the building stock where live feeds of construction and demolition data are available. Integration of 3D static models, of 3D dynamic rule-based models, of new methods of assessing data accuracy and quantifying uncertainty, and of using of platform to collect live data on stocks in emergency situations are all beginning to be tested.
Project aims
The Colouring Cities Research Programme aims to create a step change in access to free data on building stocks across cities and countries, and to help researchers and stakeholders, including citizens, come together to help improve stock quality, efficiency, sustainability and resilience. The CCRP has been specifically designed to support United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The CCRP sets out to demonstrate that permanent, high quality, open databases on stocks, overseen by academic networks, can be quickly, easily and cheaply built and maintained for cities and countries, providing these are collectively built in ways that prioritise: a) data ethics; b) data quality; c) the involvement of diverse audiences/contributors; d) objective academic oversight and e) openness and generosity in knowledge sharing. The CCRP’s development strategy is strongly influenced by Alan Turing’s belief that "the isolated individual does not develop any intellectual power …The search for new techniques must be regarded as carried out by the human community as a whole, rather than by individuals".
Colouring Cities also looks to provide basic data necessary to facilitate rapid advances in the scientific analysis of cities, and to highlight the importance of studying the stock as a dynamic system and of capturing information on change over long periods of time. This is necessary to identify and unpick negative locked-in patterns that may be impeding sustainable development, and to improve accuracy in forecasting models.
Success will be measured by: the scale of growth of the global academic network, year on year; the scale of standardised datasets collected and shared across countries; perceived value by academics of improving efficiency in research systems; success in capturing knowledge from diverse stakeholders and creating effective feedback loops between data capture methods; number and quality of publications; number and range of applications for which data are used to help improve stock quality, efficiency, sustainability and resilience as illustrated through the CCRP’s planned international showcase section.
Applications
Colouring Cities platforms are designed to provide open data to support academic research into sustainable urban development and the scientific analysis of cities. They are also relevant to those working in planning, building design, energy analysis, building construction, maintenance and management, heritage, health, economic development and primary, secondary, tertiary and lifelong education.
Platforms are also currently being explored with academic partners as tools for live disaster management, housing stock auditing, material flow tracking, and digital twins tools to support sustainable planning trajectories.
Platforms also contain a beautiful array of maps that can be co-worked to present and display collective knowledge and show its power in helping meet sustainability goals. Platforms are also used to promote human-centric AI, maximise data access, quality and accuracy, and identify key ethical issues relating to microspatial building attribute data collection, release and use.
Recent updates
January 2024. CCRP European Hub launch
We are delighted to announce the launch of the CCRP’s European Hub, the first of a series of global region hubs designed to support international development of the Colouring Cities open data platform network. The European Hub is being overseen by The Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, Research Data Centre (IOER) which also leads on Colouring Germany. Current members of the European Hub are as follows:
- Colouring Britain (Led by The Alan Turing Institute, working in collaboration with Loughborough University and other UK academic partners)
- Colouring Germany (Led by IOER, Research Data Centre)
- Colouring Sweden (Led by the Department of Sustainable Environment and Construction, School of Business Society and Engineering, Mälardalen University, Västerås
- Colouring Greece (Led by the Urban Planning Research Lab - School of Architecture & Geochoros Geospatial Analysis and GIS Research Group, School of Rural, Surveying and Geoinformatics Engineering. National Technical University of Athens
The Austrian Institute of Technology is currently joining Hub meetings to explore potential collaboration. King’s College London (co-lead on Colouring Indonesia) also attend in an advisory capacity.
CCRP International Academic Steering group and International research Software Engineering groups
The CCRP European Hub is one of three global region hubs whose set-up of is being supported by the Turing, with advice from the newly formed CCRP International Academic Steering Group (IASG). The IASG is made up of institutions supporting CCRP global development goals, either through leading on CCRP Global Region Hubs as part of existing research programmes, or inputting research time to support CCRP system design. Thanks go to current Hub leads:
- CCRP European Hub lead: Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development, Research Data Centre, (Colouring Germany)
- CCRP Asia Pacific Hub lead: City Futures Research Centre, The University of New South Wales, (Colouring Australia)
- (CCRP N. America Hub lead): Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Cities and Communities, Concordia University, (Colouring Canada).
Concordia University, and the IOER Research Data Centre also generously run the new monthly meet for the CCRP International Research Software Engineering Group, and the CCRP’s 2024 Workshop Series, respectively.
The Colouring Cities Research Programme team will also be showcasing CCRP work this March in the UK at both AI UK 2024 in London, and at The Cambridge Science Festival.