Watch our video, which explains how our City Explorer Toolkit allows city officials to compare different planning options and work out the best locations for beneficial green and blue spaces.
City Explorer Toolkit
The City Explorer Toolkit is an interactive web-based tool, which helps planners to understand where best to create urban green spaces such as parks and blue spaces such as ponds, to ensure that benefits such as cooling on a hot day, improved air quality, and noise reduction are received by the people who need them most.
Planning sustainable cities
The tool uses models and spatial data to calculate the benefits of different green infrastructure and nature-based solutions to tackle challenges in cities such as heatwaves, air pollution and flood risk.
It also uses data on the age and income levels of the population, to work out which groups of people will benefit most from a particular option. For example, the elderly and infants are most likely to benefit from measures to improve air quality.
Users can generate:
- Demand maps, which show where the need is greatest.
- Supply maps, which show where current green and blue space is already providing benefits.
- Opportunity maps, which help them plan the best locations.
- Summary information, which allows them to compare different options and reveals the social inequalities associated with these.
The tool builds on UKCEH’s many years’ experience of combining models, satellite and other data to help people make better decisions for the environment and people.
Work to develop the City Explorer Toolkit has been funded by the European Space Agency and Future Earth.
Using the City Explorer Toolkit
Watch this video to see how users can generate demand maps, supply maps, opportunity maps and summary information, supporting decision-making.