3 Questions about UDH – project in the «DSI Infrastructures & Labs» series
DSI Infrastructures & Labs are shareable infrastructures or structural vessels for creating collaborative research environments related to digital transformation. Prof. Dr. Esra Suel briefly introduces UDH, one of the projects in this series.
What exactly is the main target of the Urban Data Hub (UDH)?
Our goal is to build a shared data infrastructure for interdisciplinary research on cities. Although Switzerland has a strong urban data ecosystem, combining data from different sources remains difficult due to access constraints. This limits research on complex urban challenges that require integrated data. UDH aims to address this gap by making high-resolution, neighborhood-level data easier to access, integrate, and analyze.
Which urban challenges should be specifically addressed?
In its first phase, UDH focuses on three themes: mobility, housing, and healthy aging. Through the DSI network, we brought together an interdisciplinary team, enabling us to identify and prioritize datasets that support new cross-domain questions. For example, whether cities provide adequate transport and housing options for healthy aging. Or whether housing densification for affordability generates new travel demand that can be met by low-carbon mobility options.
What effect do you hope to achieve in the long term?
We aim for the UDH to become a platform that enables interdisciplinary urban research through a growing collection of harmonized datasets. By providing data at consistent geographic and temporal scales, the UDH will make it easier to combine insights and data from different disciplines, support new research questions, and foster collaboration across fields working on urban challenges.
All projects of the series «DSI Infrastructures & Labs» can be found here.
Esra Suel is an Associate Professor of Urban Analytics in the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and a DSI Professor. Her research group uses computational methods to analyze built environments and human behavior in cities, with a focus on mobility, land use, housing, and their links to social, environmental, and health inequalities.