ODI Fridays: How can we colour in data for every building in London?

Colouring London is an open data platform, designed by The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis in University College London, to collect, collate, visualise, and make accessible, fifty categories of statistical data, for every building in London How many buildings are there in London? What are their characteristics? Where are they located and how do they contribute to the city? How adaptable are they? How long will they last, and what are the environmental and socio-economic implications of demolition? Colouring London is being designed to address these questions by crowdsourcing and visualising information on London’s buildings. About the speaker Polly Hudson’s PhD research looks at ways in which spatial patterns of demolition, when observed over long time periods, can help predict vulnerability and resilience in the building stock. Colouring London’ has evolved out of lack of data available to carry out this work, and has been co-designed with Tom Russell, the project’s tech lead. This builds on her work in the 1990s into free physical knowledge exchange centres relating to the building stock, and into public GIS interface design and city evolution animations. She has been a been a visiting fellow at The Centre for the Historic Environment, University of Oxford and has held public appointments at English Heritage, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, The National Lottery (charitable arm) and the RIBA.