Earlier this week, I participated in a [panel on the Land Use Framework](Edge Debate 179) at FutureBuild'25. This was curated by Edge, and co-panelists included Baroness Young of Old Scone (Chair), Maya Singer Hobbs, Carolyn McKenzie, and Stephen Hill. Each of us spoke for 5-7minutes and then the chair opened for questions from the floor.

In my talk, titled “Land use data to inform decision making - How it could work”, I tried to make three clear points:

  1. Good decisions are linked to the “state” of land, and this is too complex to understand without direct evidence. (Good) data provide the context for (good) decisions.
  2. We need data that changes “at the speed of decisions”. This context needs to reflect the current state of affairs, which changes much more rapidly than we have been able to gather data from in the past.
  3. There’s a lot of very cool stuff happening in the world of data to support this view of the world. For example, and I may be biased here, the single most exciting development of the last ten years is the ability to make increasingly more abundant imagery from satellites computable so it can feed into these decisions.1

Given the prompt to talk about “how it could work”, I gave a shout to our DemoLand project, as an illustration of how to combine data and AI to support land use decisions.

I closed the intervention with an afterword, two points I really wanted to make but couldn’t elegantly squeeze in the previous part:

  1. Data (as well as the models and, eventually, digital twins they feed into) are best thought of as human augmentation rather than replacement. As much as some might like it that way, I don’t think any of this is about the robots taking over the job of the planners, it’s about super-charging planners!
  2. Urban land is land! This is by now one of my hobby horses. Much of the land discussion (be it on modelling, understanding or affecting it through policy) is focused on “most of the land”. This makes sense to a certain extent. After all, cities are about 5% of the land. However, if we’re serious about curving emissions and building a better home for most of the population, this 5% clearly punches above its weight (e.g., about 75% emissions come from cities whom, in a country like the UK, house about 80% of the population).

  1. This is in part why we launched Imago, to bring all this good stuff to the social sciences, public health, and policymaking arenas. ↩︎