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.