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.