UDENE

Urban Development Explorations Using Natural Experiments

Start date: 01/01/2024

Duration: 24 months

Topic: HORIZON-EUSPA-2022-SPACE-02-56

Total budget: EUR 1 056 913

The UDENE Project aims to use large amounts of Earth Observation (EO) data from Copernicus satellites and local sources to support evidence-based decision making for urban development. To support the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 of making cities safe, resilient, and sustainable, the project will essentially create a virtual laboratory for urban planners and visionaries to test their development ideas. Multi-dimensional models of urban areas across time and across countries will be used to support urban planners in exploring natural occurrences of similar development ideas, concepts, or projects in similar urban areas (natural experiments).

The wealth of EO data in fast accessible Data Cube format provides a great search space for exploring natural experiments, by exploiting greater value-add of causal analysis. Project outcomes will be embodied by an exploration tool for natural experiments and a match-making tool which will leverage the exploration tool by linking the existing EO product, process, or service offerings. Project activities include cooperations for data acquisition and partnership building that will be facilitated by Open (FSTP) Calls.

UDENE AT A GLANCE

o Structure local in-situ data on urban environments as data cubes and link them to existing Copernicus data cube federations so as to enable fast exploration of impact evidence of potential urban development ideas across time and locations in EO data.
Jointly develop new and advanced sensitivity analysis algorithms in order to verify and operationalize multivariate causal effects models of the impact that an urban development option.
Build partnerships between the European downstream applications sector and non-EU (public/private) entities towards valorisation of existing EO-related technologies and promoting further investments.

OUR ROLE

InoSens will support the Open Calls Management process and contribute to dissemination and exploitation activities in both Serbia and Europe, thereby boosting space-based competencies in Serbia. InoSens will also actively support the design of user guidelines for the tools developed within the UDENE project.