M3. COLOURING BRITAIN - colouring-cities/manual GitHub Wiki

Lead academic institution (including department) or academic consortium

The Alan Turing Institute. Urban Analytics. Colouring Cities Research Programme host.

Lead institution link

https://www.turing.ac.uk/research/research-projects/colouring-london-and-colouring-cities-research-programme

Lead institution's public research institution verification link

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ukri-endorsement-employing-or-hosting-institutions-global-talent-visa/ukri-list-of-approved-research-organisations

Associate academic institutions

  • University of Oxford
  • Loughborough University
  • Newcastle University
  • University College London

City/Cities selected for initial testing

London and Loughborough. Colouring London operated as the CCRP capital city prototype until 2023. Colouring Loughborough operates as the regional/town prototype led by Loughborough University.

Platform link/s

Social media links

None

Articles, publications and events links

Please add to the group pagehere

CCRP start date

Colouring London development began at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London in 2016. The CCRP was set up at the Alan Turing Institute Turing in 2020.

Anticipated launch date/s

  • Demonstration model testing: Colouring London launch 2018
  • Regional hub testing: Colouring Loughborough planned 2023
  • National rollout: Englana and Wales planned Spring 2024 ('Colouring Britain' is tested instead of 'Colouring UK' as building footprints are managed separately for Northern Ireland (The United Kingdom is a political term referring to the countries of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 'Great Britain' and 'Britain' refer to the geographic area comprising England, Scotland and Wales only). Changing political circumstances also mean that individual countries in the UK may wish, at some point, to set up separate platforms. Though as a rule as much integration as possible between countries is sought, recognition of the need to accommodate possible future, lawful, changes to geographic boundaries is important, and relevant to all CCRP partners).

CCRP Academic team at the Alan Turing Institute

  • Principal Investigator/Originator: Polly Hudson (2016-Current)
  • Co-Investigator: Dr Falli Palaiologou (2017-current- UCL/Loughborough University)
  • Software engineering: Dr Mike Simpson (2022-25- Newcastle University)
  • Research Management: Urban Analytics, The Alan Turing Institute: Professor Mark Birkin, Kelin Yue, (2020-Current)
  • Advisors: Tom Russell (Technical Architect, 2016-Current- University of Oxford);

CCRP alumnae at the Turing: Will Taylor (2020-22); Ed Chalstrey (Turing REG, 2021-2022- software engineering); Mateusz Konieczny (2021-2022) software engineering); Maciej Ziarkowski (2020-2021- software engineering).

Academic team Loughborough University- Colouring Britain regional prototype

  • PI: Dr Taimaz Larimian
  • Software engineering: Mateusz Konieczny
  • Data Science research: Mihyun Kim
  • Advisors: Dr Falli Palaiologou

Multidisciplinary expertise

  • Urban analytics
  • Spatial analysis-
  • Design of multidisciplinary open tools about building stocks
  • GIS
  • Stock dynamics
  • Community planning
  • Construction
  • Architecture
  • Planning
  • Architectural history
  • Historic building conservation
  • Graphic design
  • Software engineering
  • Open data licences
  • Computational approaches to data generation
  • Data ethics

Key collaborators

  • Ordnance Survey
  • Historic England
  • The Greater London Authority

Additional partners

Funding

NB This includes all costs/funding for the research and development of Colouring London prototype (2014-present), set up and management of CCRP (2020- present), and roll out of Colouring Britain (2022- present).

Current total secured excluding help-in-kind = £826,176 + Grant 14 to be added

  • Grant 14: **CURRENT **

    • Type: Academic host (Alan Turing Institute) internal grant
    • Date: Sep 2023 – Aug 2025
    • Amount: £197,000 per year
    • Funder: Alan Turing Institute
    • Purpose: Management and development of CCRP international and national programmes

  • Grant 13: **CURRENT **

    • Type: Academic collaborator funding:
    • Date: Jan 2023 - 2026
    • Amount: Year 1: Year 2: Year 3:
    • Funder: Loughborough University
    • Source: UK government Town Deal programme
    • Purpose: Developed of Colouring Loughborough and open code able to be used to support the Town Deal programme in other geographic locations. Colouring London will also be monitored and supported by Turing Colouring Britain's first regional academic data upload hub.

  • Grant 12: **CURRENT **

    • Type: Academic host (Alan Turing Institute) internal grant
    • Date: Sep 2022 – Aug 2023
    • Amount: £197,000
    • Funder: Alan Turing Institute
    • Purpose: Management and development of CCRP international and national programmes

  • Grant 11:

    • Type: Academic collaborator funding:
    • Date: May 2022 – Sep 2022
    • Amount: £47,000
    • Funder: Loughborough University Enterprise Project Group (EPG) grant
    • Source grant: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
    • Purpose: To integrate design for live streaming of planning data, colour coded by progress status, into Colouring London.

  • Grant 10:

    • Type: Academic collaborator funding:
    • Date: 2021-2022
    • Amount: £3,000 (tbc)
    • Funder: Awarded by the Software Sustainable Institute to Tom Russell at the University of Oxford
    • Purpose: Supports coordination on international CCRP engineering meetings and oversight of technical architecture

  • Grant 9: CURRENT

    • Type: Host (Alan Turing Institute) core funding
    • Date: Sep 2021 – Aug 2022
    • Amount: £1,500
    • Funder: Alan Turing Institute
    • Purpose: Azure server credits

  • Grant 8: CURRENT

    • Type: Host (Alan Turing Institute) core funding
    • Date: Sep 2021 – Aug 2022
    • Amount: £5,000
    • Funder: Alan Turing Institute
    • Purpose: Additional software engineering assistance

  • Grant 7: CURRENT

    • Type: Government research funding
    • Date: Sep 2021 – Aug 2022
    • Amount: £197,000
    • Funder: AI and Science for Government (ASG) allocated by the Alan Turing Institute
    • Purpose: Management and development of CCRP international and national programmes

  • Grant 6:

    • Type: Government strategic funding (Heritage)
    • Date: October 2020–September 2021
    • Amount: £100,000
    • Funder: Historic England
    • Purpose: Developing prototype and advancing Historic England’s strategic objectives

  • Grant 5:

    • Type: Academic/commercial research collaboration, innovation award
    • Date: June 2019–April 2020
    • Amount: 159,996
    • Funder: Innovate UK:/ Geospatial Commission (VU.City lead partner)
    • Purpose: Academic/business partnership to develop open tools to test prototype platform to improve public consultation on planning

  • Grant 4:

    • Type: Innovation in research award - Doctoral training grant follow-on from research council
    • Date: (March 2019– July 2020)
    • Amount: £55,200
    • Funder: EPSRC Impact Acceleration Grant AA grant via UCL Innovation and Enterprise
    • Purpose: Colouring London prototype platform development

  • Grant 3:

    • Type: Academic host (Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL) internal research funding
    • Date: Nov 2018–April 2019
    • Amount: £19,163
    • Funder: MacArthur Foundation via CASA, UCL
    • Purpose: Colouring London prototype platform development supporting New Urban Agenda delivery

  • Grant 2:

    • Type: Government strategic grant (Heritage) to CASA/UCL
    • Date: June 2017–May 2018
    • Amount: £46,318
    • Funder: Historic England
    • Purpose: Colouring London prototype platform development to advance Historic England’s strategic objectives

  • Grant 1:

    • Type: Doctoral training grant/CASA studentship awarded by the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London (UCL)
    • Date: Sep 2014-Sep 2017
    • Amount: £50,000
    • Funder: Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) via UCL
    • Purpose: Doctoral thesis funding (3 years)

Significant value help in kind, in addition to stakeholder contributions in time to collaborative maintenance/feature design and content

Date: October 2020–September 2021 (academic collaboration) Amount: £70,000 Provider: Alan Turing Institute Purpose: Project management to support open data platform design, national and international knowledge sharing relating to data science and the development of public engagement tools

Date: 2016–2022 Amount: c. £50,000 equivalent value per year Provider: Ordnance Survey Purpose: Facilitate testing of Colouring London and CCRP

Applications tested

Title: Colouring London Visualisation tool- completed 2022. Phase 2 planned 2023

  • CCRP partner lead/s: Alan Turing Institute
  • Description: Development of open-source code for live streaming and colour coding of planning applications into Colouring London to allow change to be more easily tracked, and to integrate a fourth data capture method
  • Collaborating organisations:
  • Alan Turing Institute CCRP
  • Loughborough University (UK)
  • Funding: £50,000 from Loughborough University's Enterprise Project Group (EPG) (UK grant)
  • Timeframe: May - December 2022
  • Relevant research area/s:

Title: Inferring building age using historical network data

  • Descriptions: Use of vectorised historical streetnetwork data to infer building age
  • Research partners: Alan Turing Institute CCRP, Liverpool University (Dr Flora Roumpani)
  • Funding: Existing research budgets
  • Timeframe: Ongoing
  • Relevant research areas: Energy analysis/calculations, building longevity, cohort survival, 3D procedural modelling, large-scale automated open building attribute generation

Title: Historical data integration

  • CCRP partner lead/s: Alan Turing Institute
  • Description: Use of computer vision of extract historical footprints and integration into Coluring London prototype. Editing feature for historical polygons and option to link extraction of hist
  • Research partners: Alan Turing Institute CCRP; University of Southern California. Information Sciences Institute; The Alan Turing Institute 'Living with Machines'; The Alan Turing Institute 'Machine Reading Maps'; The Alan Turing Institute Computer Vision and Digital Heritage SIG; The National Library of Scotland regarding
  • Funding: Planned to be developed as part of existing funded programmes.
  • Timeframe: tbc
  • Relevant research area/s: Open historical mapping, computer vision, heritage, architectural history, urban morphology, persistence and resilience of building form, crowdsourcing, building longevity and survival rates

Title: Global Earthquake Model (GEM) Foundation collaboration

  • Descriptions: Data sharing between GEM and CCRP tested with Colouring Indonesia - and integration of GEM construction taxonomy
  • Research partners: GEM, King's College London, Alan Turing Institute CCRP
  • Funding: Existing research budgets
  • Timeframe: Ongoing
  • Relevant research areas: Risk assessment, disaster management, construction data taxonomy

Title: Procedural London

  • Descriptions: Initial testing of integration of 3D open rule-based model into the Colouring London prototype
  • Research partners: Liverpool University (Dr Flora Roumpani), Alan Turing Institute CCRP
  • Funding: tbc
  • Timeframe: tbc
  • Relevant research areas: Procedural modelling, digital twins, planning simulations, 3D dynamic modelling
  • Relevant papers: Flora Roumpani, Polly Hudson & Andrew Hudson-Smith (2018) The Use of Historical Data in Rule-Based Modelling for Scenarios to Improve Resilience within the Building Stock, The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice, 9:3-4, 328-345, DOI: 10.1080/17567505.2018.1517142 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17567505.2018.1517142:

Open building footprint source/s

See Ordnance Survey MasterMap with planned use in 2023 of Microsoft/Bing footprints. See also CCRP page at https://github.com/colouring-cities/manual/wiki/D2.-TECHNICAL-(2)-BUILDING-FOOTPRINT-sources

Primary research drivers

Initially to address fragmentation and inaccessible of spatial building attribute data in Uk at building level. Since 2020 to develop a network of interoperable international platforms run by academia but involving diverse stakeholders in all participating countries that collectively build a global open database that supports UN Sustainable Development Goals.

What are the most useful aspects of the Colouring Cities Research Programme for you?

  • Seeing the open code for Colouring London being tested by colleagues working across countries
  • Learning from CCRP colleagues why the platform is useful to them, what challenges they face in platform set up, how different or similar are these to other CCRP partners
  • Learning from colleagues re improvements required to open code
  • Co-working with research colleagues on data categories/types, data standards/formatting, and research papers
  • Co testing data capture methods and improving methods for data verification/increased data accuracy
  • Understanding potential applications/use cases in an international context
  • Understanding similarities and differences in buildings stocks across countries
  • Learning from other countries as to what is needed to improve sustainability and resilience of stocks.

What are the greatest challenges you anticipate during Colouring Britain platform set up?

  • Semi restricted access to UK national mapping footprints: Access to the highest quality building footprints (Ordnance Survey MasterMap) continues to be an issue though progress in release has been made and Colouring Britain has permission to use footprints for data capture (see appendix add ref). Download of polygons by the public is still however not permitted. This, and lack of open access to national address data also continues to hinder interface development.
  • Restrictions on UK property tax data (see Section E). These are able to provide several hundred million data entries for Colouring Britain but are unlikely to be lifted in the near future by the UK government. This means that significant time is required to test alternative data capture methods (see Section F). This will result in fewer opportunities to analyse data with UK researchers and CCRP colleagues and to to share results and data across * countries.
  • Dynamics data capture is likely to be slow initially
  • Difficulties exist in maintaining continuity in software engineering teams

Key contribution to CCRP

Concept, governance model design and Colouring London prototype development

Additional advisors and audience groups consulted

See Colouring London contributor page

Plan of action 2023

  • scale up the Colouring London platform to Colouring England and Wales
  • identify national footprints to be used
  • rebrand the Colouring London as Colouring Britain
  • set up a working group of national bodies holding data benefiting from involvement
  • support set up of Colouring Loughborough and help develop as self managing academic model for regional data upload hubs to: maximise the amount of high quality data entered, in the most efficient, cost effective way, to explore diverse applications for the data captured, to bring together and support researchers/departments in Britain involved in research into the sustainable development of the national stock and/or public engagement in stock quality/sustainability and to understand and address additional data needs of those researching into Britain's building stock
  • set up the 'Showcase/Application' section to show data applications and encourage industry to increase open data release
  • demo use of platform as national open database and stock auditing and performance tracking tool
  • automate bulk uploads and set up academic moderation
  • test computational approaches to infer characteristics, and upload these