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What is the CCRP and why is it needed?

The Colouring Cities Research Programme (CCRP) is a collaborative,open knowledge research initiative, designed to drive a step-change in the availability of spatial data on national building stocks. Building stocks are the most significant socio-cultural and economic resource of cities and their largest capital asset. They are where we spend most of our lives, impacting on our happiness, health, wellbeing and financial security, as well as the quality, safety, efficiency, sustainability and economic vitality of the areas in which we live and work. Buildings and built infrastructure are also responsible for almost 40% of global energy-related carbon emissions and 50% of all extracted materials (UNFCC, 2023).

The CCRP oversees a global network of free Colouring Cities visualisation platforms and open databases, providing microspatial data on the composition, operation, and long-term dynamic behaviour of buildings stocks and built infrastructure, with data on the natural environment also now captured. Research Institutions from over 30 countries are currently involved. All source code and data are released under open licences.

Collected data are used to improve the quality, efficiency, sustainability and resilience of national building stocks, to support AI and ML insights, to assist government’s in the move to net zero, and to support United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. CCRP platforms are managed by national research institutions and research consortia,facilitate knowledge exchange about the environment between academia, government, industry, the third sector, and citizens on relevant SDG related data, and who who collaborate across countries to reduce research overlaps and costs, and accelerate problem solving

CCRP mission

• To effect a step change in the range and scale of spatial building attribute data freely available at building level, relevant to socio-cultural, economic and environmental research, urban management and sustainable building practice worldwide;

• To provide data necessary to improve the quality, sustainability, efficiency and resilience of stocks, to support and accelerate progress towards United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and its New Urban Agenda;

• To address data and knowledge fragmentation in relation to building stocks and issues such as data fragmentation, incompleteness, quality, inaccessibility, reliability, aggregation, inconsistency, security and privacy. To do this through mechanisms that facilitate knowledge and data sharing across sectors, disciplines and communities;

• To test and integrate a range of data capture methods, including computational approaches; crowdsourcing and live streaming, and feedback loops between these, to support interdisciplinary work and engagement of diverse stakeholders in knoweldge exchange and to maximise data richness, accuracy, granularity, range and geographic cover;

• To advance discussion on ethical issues relating to the capture and release of building attribute data, and promote ethical, inclusive, reproducible, and collaborative data science, as laid out in The Turing Way. *

• To provide the scale and quality of spatiotemporal data required to facilitate the use AI and machine learning, and the development of digital twins and simulations, to accelerate the move to net zero and to increase resilience in stocks and better understand the stock as a dynamic system; to present access to case studiesshowing diverse applications

• To test a decentralised academic governance model for trustworthy, research-led, networked, low-cost, open data platforms providing standardised at building level data across cities and countries.

• To reduce research costs, facilitate rapid international research institution collaborations, and drive knoweldge, data and resource sharing.

Though information on building characteristics has always been relevant to housing, planning, building design and construction, conservation and taxation, increased demand for large-scale spatial building attribute datasets, over the past decade, has largely been due to the urgent need to model, analyse and predict emissions and to assess risk to the built environment in the context of climate change. However, in many countries spatial, and spatiotemporal data, at building level, is extremely hard to obtain, often being highly fragmented across sectors and disciplines, restricted or charged for, unavailable, unverified, and/or only available in aggregated form. Building attribute data are also rarely standardised across countries, with time series data spanning decades or centuries, able to support predictive models, extremely difficult to access. This prevents comparative analysis, and limits the potential of AI and ML to provide critical insights into the operation and performance of stocks at national and global scale, and over time. The CCRP works to address these issues

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How is the CCRP system work?

The CCRP offers a simple, efficient approach to advancing knowledge sharing on buildings and cities, at local, national and global scale, and one that prioritises privacy, security, ethical use of data, and access for all. It does this by combining a trusted academic framework and research-led approach, with a reproducible open model and a voluntary, distributed management and contributor network. It then uses the resulting low-cost digital structure to help academic partners within participating countries collect, visualise and share standardised building level attribute data. This in turn reduces data costs and improves data quality and availability. It also allows for new informal multidisciplinary, international research collaborations to be rapidly set up and for research teams to collaborate on common problems across countries.

Colouring Cities platforms and databases are sustainable, resilient, interoperable and permanent national resources. They are designed to be developed over time, in parallel with participating institution’s SDG related research programmes, enriched by researchers, students, citizens, government, industry and the voluntary sector, year-by-year. All CCRP collaborators contribute time to the CCRP in a way that directly benefits their research as well as the CCRP’s goals. All Colouring Cities platforms are independently managed at national level by academic partners and funded through existing research programmes coupled with new local/national and international grants. Demos are generally initially funded as part of specific research programmes , often with PhD help, and then used to lever support and funding for small platform/database development teams.

Governance and background The Colouring Cities Research Programme is a fully dentralised system overseen by a voluntary academic consortium of CCRP partners and CCRP Global Hub and Expert group Leads. The CCRP was previous hosted at The Alan Turing Institute (UK) from 2000-2025 with The Colouring London prototype developed and tested at The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London between 2014 and 2019.

CCRP Global Hubs currently operate for North America, chaired by Concordia University (Canada); for Europe, co-chaired by the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development Research Data Centre (Germany) and Loughboroigh University (UK); for Latin America, co- chaired by St Andrew’s University; for Africa by Dedan Kimathi University of Technology (Kenya) and KNUST (Ghana) and for the Asia Pacific region by the University of New South Wales (Australia) and King’s College London. Hub leads help drive network expansion and knowledge sharing at regional level and chair bimonthly meetings. Platform content is also advised by CCRP expert groups, which focus on specific SDG related problems and CCRP data content and formatting, and by national research bodies including Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US in relation to long-term research goals. Academic partners also benefit from monthly CCRP international software engineering meetings, run by Concordia University, and support in platform repository set, as well asfree workshops and talks.

CCRP partners agree to work collaboratively towards CCRP goals, to follow CCRP protocols, codes of conduct and branding. Platforms have been specifically designed to be able to be managed at low cost alongside other core university resources. Where these are embedded as core research resources, and used and contributed to by more than one universities, at an early stage, they are likely to be more sustainable and successful. CCRP core platform code, and additional country specific code, are released under a GNU General Public License via GitHub. CCRP building attribute datasets are released via individual international platforms under an Open Data Commons Open Database License, and the CCRP Open Manual released on GitHub under an MIT License.

Individual Colouring platforms/databases are run by researchers requiring CCRP data for SDG related research, working with research software engineers. Collaborations between planning, energy and or built environment, and computer science faculties, (across or within universities) are common, as is the development of a national academic partner network interested in helping with data moderation and upload and stakeholder engagement at regional level. This allows Colouring platform academic leads to lever funding to manage the technical side of national databases and collaborate with relevant CCRP Global Region Hubs, and for moderation and upload, analysis and application to be contributed to by national network partners.

The CCRP also offers a welcoming, stimulating and inclusive space for researchers interested in open knowledge and open data systems, in co-working on complex urban problem solving, and in thoughtful, considerate, research collaboration.

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Who’s involved?

The Colouring Cities model has been built and successfully tested since 2016 with the help of over 150 researchers worldwide. It is now rapidly expanding, with research institutions in over 30 countries at various stages of engagement. Current academic network contributors include, from Australia, University of New South Wales; Austria, AIT and BOKU; Bahrain, University of Bahrain; Britain, Alan Turing Institute and Loughborough University and researchers from the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Newcastle, Exeter, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and UCL; Canada, Concordia University; China/Hong Kong, Hong Kong PolyU; Colombia, Universidad di San Jose; Germany (IOER); Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah University of Technology; Greece, University of Patras, and National Technical University of Athens; Indonesia, King’s College London and Institut Teknologi, Bandung; Kenya, Dedan Kimathi University of Technology; Lebanon, American University of Beirut; Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University; Poland, Poznan University of Technology;Singapore, National University of Singapore; Switzerland EPFL Lausanne; South Africa, Tishwane University of Technology; Spain, IREC; Sweden, Mälardalen University; Turkey, Istanbul Technical University, and the United States, University of Florida, Perelman School of Medicine, Penn University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Multidisciplinary expertise within the CCRP includes: computer science, data science, software engineering, urban science, industrial ecology, urban morphology, physics, environmental science, material science, climate change, resilience and risk, building construction, engineering, conservation, housing, health, deprivation, humanitarian aid, planning, architecture, history, architectural history, graphic design, colour theory, open data systems, AI, (including ML and CV), synthetic data, procedural modelling/3D simulation, probabilistic modelling, GIS and spatial data visualisation and uncertainty quantification. Data ethics and ethical use of building level footprints and the identification of security and privacy concerns relating to the visualisation and release of building attribute data form key areas of CCRP work.

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Live platform links

All platforms are different stages of development, as shown on the map at the top of the page.

Live links are currently available for:

• Colouring Indonesia
• Colouring Australia
• Colouring Britain Please note Colouring Britain is temporarily unavailable as it is being transferred from The Alan turing Institute to Loughborough University, with backups at the University of Cambridge.
• Colouring Canada
• Colouring Germany
• Colouring Greece
• Colouring Sweden

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How do Colouring platforms work

Colouring Cities platforms collect, collate, verify, visualise and release microspatial building attribute data, on building characteristics, building performance, and the short and long-term dynamic behaviour of building stocks. Four main methods of data capture and upload to platforms are used: Open bulk uploads of data uploaded manually and moderated by academia; crowdsourcing at building level with vectorised footprints able to be ‘coloured in’ with information, live; streaming of official data using APIs, and computational methods including AI, ML, GIS based spatial analysis and simulation. Data accuracy is maximised through the ongoing testing and improvement of feedback loops between the methods, verification tools, provision of information on collection method used, and uncertainty quantification (planned). This multipronged approach is also necessary to encourage knowledge contributions from diverse sectors, disciplines and communities.

Platforms are designed to ask basic questions such as How many buildings do we have? What type of building are they? What are they used for? And made of? How old are they? How repairable, adaptable and extendable? How energy efficient are they? How suitable for retrofit and have they been retrofitted? What is their green context? How many demolitions have taken place each site? What is their relationship to the street? Who built them? What is the ownership type? How well do local communities think they work, and what impact does their presence or loss have on communities, and on their physical landscapes, in environmental, economic and socio-cultural terms.

Over 150 classes of standardised spatial data are integrated. These are contained within the 12 CCRP categories: Building location (and ID), Land Use (and economic activity), Building Type & Form, Size, Construction and Materials, Age & History, Street Context (including green context), Planning Context and Protection, Energy Performance, Resilience/Live disaster management, and Community value. Platforms also visualise more standard GIS layers such as flooding zones, planning zones, protected views designated housing/economic/creative areas. Vectorised historical maps are also included, where such maps are available, as are specialised tools such as the CCRP disaster management tool which allows building damage at building level to be mapped live.

Geolocated building footprints operate as mini filing cabinets able to capture, collate, verify, release, and visualise the spatial data, as well as providing information on the building ‘s shape and size. Since 2024 CCRP international expert groups have begun to be formed for all 12 CCRP main data categories. These recommend changes and additions to CCRP core data classes which are then reflected in the CCRP core repository.

CCCP partners use identical interfaces and logos and core data classes to maximise interoperability of systems, to maintain programme and platform quality, and to maximise user trust. No other applications of Colouring Cities open code are endorsed by the CCRP or The Alan Turing Institute other than those specified on the CCRP GitHub site and the Alan Turing Institute ‘s CCRP webpage. This is important as experimentation with CCRP code is actively encouraged. Clear visual branding is also necessary to allow the purpose, principles, and quality of CCRP platforms to be instantly understood regardless of which country a Colouring Cities platform is operating in. Where platforms differ is in additional subcategory inclusion specific to national or regional contexts.

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Contact

If you are an academic institution involved in research into SDG related topics and would like to discussbecoming part of the CCRP network, please contact Polly Hudson at pavh2@cam.ac.uk. ___________________________