
An open source data approach to tackling housing targets in Newcastle

- Company: Urban Intelligence
- Client: Newcastle City Council
- Year: 2022
- Region: England
- Product: PlaceMaker
- Geographical information systems (GIS) and mapping
- Land search and assessment
- Plan-making, planning application and data management systems
Introduction
By incorporating open source data through PlaceMaker, Newcastle’s planners gained deeper insights into their communities, development opportunities, and constraints. This data is also enabling them to better understand capacity and density across the city, supporting them to consider how policy decisions are going to impact future housing delivery.
Challenges
The need for accurate, up-to-date information was critical for identifying and assessing potential sites to meet development needs. Kathy highlighted how PlaceMaker’s ability to support a streamlined call for sites process and assess unregistered land was particularly appealing. “PlaceMaker can automatically assess all sites across our authority area,” she noted, enabling the council to address Newcastle’s constrained land supply and focus on densification strategies to meet their development targets.
Solutions
Whilst not reliant on other teams for data collection, plan-making is still incredibly collaborative. The unlimited users in PlaceMaker allows specialists from across the council to access the platform, input data and provide comments in a centralised system. This ensures information is organised, accessible, and no longer buried in email chains or outdated spreadsheets and PDFs.
Results
Reflecting on their progress, Kathy shared, “Having access to this pool of resources has been an amazing education and helped us move forward in digital local plan making. It has enabled us to think through what a ‘digital local plan’ really means and the different ways we can achieve that.”
“What’s great about working with Urban Intelligence and the PlaceMaker software, is all the expertise that the team brings. It’s not just an off the shelf product…we wouldn’t have had access to the in-house resource and capabilities to the same degree before working with them.”
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