International Land Use Symposium (ILUS) 2017
Use of spatial modelling and data visualisation to enlighten future sustainable policy making

On behalf of the local organizing committee it is our great pleasure to invite you to the International Land Use Symposium on “Spatial data modelling and visualisation to enlighten sustainable policy making”, to be held November 1-3 2017, in Dresden, capital of the German federal state of Saxony. The International Symposium brings together leading academics and interested attendees for presentation, discussion, and collaborative networking in the fields of spatial sciences, environmental studies, geography, cartography, GIScience, urban planning, architecture, which relate to investigations of settlements and infrastructure. In particular, the interdisciplinary meeting will examine new ideas in overlapping fields of studies with the goal of advancing our understanding of built-up areas, and how recent developments in spatial analysis and modeling can lead to sustainable resource management, better support of planning and regional development, enhanced spatial information and knowledge, and optimized strategies, instruments and tools.

Topics

  • Big Data and the City as a Complex System
    The new millennium has seen the rise of the urban era, a period of human civilization in which almost four billion people (more than half the world’s population) live in towns or cities. The New Urban Agenda is the outcome document of the Habitat III cities conference. It sets global standards of achievement in sustainable urban development. Cities can be defined as complex adaptive systems because of their heterogeneity, interconnectivity, scaling, circular-causality and continuous development. In view of the growth in geodata and the heterogeneity of datasets on towns and cities, there is an urgent need for alternatives to traditional spatial analysis within geographic information systems for a better understanding of cities. Modern techniques from statistics, machine learning and data mining are frequently discussed to support the knowledge extraction and to allow the visualization of results and the application of validation procedures.
  • Historic Settlement and Landscape Analysis
    Research on the historical evolution of settlements and landscapes has a long scientific tradition. The session invites contributions regarding theoretical foundations of Land Change Science, methodical concepts, and application-oriented works in this research field. Theoretical contributions may include concepts, ontologies, and critical reviews of the field. Methodical contributions may include algorithms for the data acquisition from historical data sources (i.e. old maps, archival satellite imagery, documents, etc.) such as map image processing, machine learning, but also crowdsourcing approaches; algorithms for the integration of multi-temporal and multi-scale data sources; and for change detection and uncertainty estimation for spatiotemporal modeling. Application-oriented contributions may comprise landscape change analyses and ecosystems services, patterns of urban sprawl and growth, historical demography, calibration of land-use change and climate models, digital humanities (archaeology, etc.), and research on land change (4D) visualizations using historical geodata. We welcome short-term (i.e. decades) investigations as well as long-term (i.e. centuries, Anthropocene) studies.
  • Morphological Analysis
    The interdisciplinary field of urban morphology is the science of urban forms at different scales. In particular, it studies the city as a human habitat through the analysis of our tangible physical artefacts. Common questions in this field are how the physical form can be quantitatively measured, how it changes over time and how those measures can be used to compare different cities. Spatial metrics are particularly suited to the quantification of specific physical characteristics. Spatial metrics are recognized as appropriate urban planning tools and offer great promise to planners because they can measure the configuration of urban elements in both time and space and at different scales from individual buildings, to urban blocks to the entire city. The wide availability of geo-referenced data in recent years has opened up new potentials to explore the physical and structural characteristics. Analyses can be conducted at much higher spatial resolutions and can encompass many more diverse indicators.
  • Varia: This topic contains free contributions whose topical focus is indirectly related