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The Colouring Cities Research Programme is a collaborative, open knowledge research initiative designed to significantly improve the availability of building data worldwide. In doing so, it develops open code and reproducible platforms that collect, verify, and visualize data on national building stocks and further topics deemed relevant to the individual
user/municipality. The programme operates as an open digital platform, enabling citizen science by allowing the public to collaboratively gather and visualize building-related information.
It currently has over 20 national partners, with engagement across 30 countries. These partners are working on their individual platforms while the team led by Polly Hudson – and, in the case of Dresden – Robert Hecht provide research ready micro special data on areas such as the built and the green environment.
An outstanding feature of CCRP is that any municipality or entity interested in cooperating does not have to provide funds or train its staff to implement activities of the CCRP “community.”
Key takeaways and opportunities for Urban Digital Twins:
- Integration of standardized platform data into digital twin applications – use harmonized, interoperable datasets as a shared foundation for scalable use cases
- Colouring Cities platform for crowdsourced validation – enable citizen-based collection and verification of building and urban data
- Reuse of data harmonization and processing pipelines – apply existing data workflows to ensure consistency, efficiency, and scalability
- Experimental prototyping of interactive front-end applications – use Colouring Cities as a testbed for developing and evaluating user-facing digital twin interfaces
- Using shared data trustee models for secure sharing of sensitive data – Integrate data donation services directly into portals via iframe for seamless accessibility and interaction
The slides presented can be accessed here.
Interested in becoming a coloured city and in working with Polly? Reach out to us via ISCN@giz.de
Interested in learning more about Polly’s and Robert’s work?