DSSGx Munich 2023
Past Projects & Fellows

In 2011, the European Commission stated the target of reducing land consumption to no net land-take by 2050. National strategies for sustainable development adopted the target, following different timeframes for implementation. Protecting biodiversity and strengthening climate-adaptation affords integrated and climate-oriented planning on state, regional and local levels. As for now, distributed responsibilities and competing interests for new settlements conflict with sustainable land use. Scattered documentation of governance decisions, gaps and errors in documentation impede the transparent planning and data-based decision making. Having no central platform to analyze land use plans on regional and local level impedes democratic negotiation on how to deal with climate change.

In this project, the fellows used web/document scraping to produce a dataset about land parcels from districts across Germany. For each land parcel, the dataset supplied important details about their land use planning - and consequently, land sealing. Afterwards, the fellows assisted researchers from various urban planning organizations within Germany, to analyze the data and answer questions about climate-change and climate-resilience in these regions. 

The civil protection/fire brigade currently does not have a good tool that shows the range of fire hoses on a map and takes natural obstacles such as stairs, rails, buildings, etc. into account. However, this is essential for planning. A representation of the range of extinguishing water extraction points as the crow flies is not sufficient to take these factors into account.

The fellows will develop a web app that has two main functions. First, after selecting an extinguishing water extraction point and a variable hose length, the program supplies a polygon of the area that can be reached from there. Second, after selecting a building or a hypothetical fire site and a variable hose length, the program delivers a polygon within which should have an extinguishing water extraction point .

This enables the following immediate application :

• • Improved planning of the coverage of fire water extraction points

  • Sighting of water sources in the vicinity of known/probable fire sites (e.g. chemical plants)

  • The tool is constructed in such a way that the actual extraction points do not have to be known. The input of geolocations from the fire brigade/ disaster control will be an additional feature of the program.