Didier Vancutsem
Chairman
The International Society of City and Regional Planners
Belgium

Biography
Didier Vancutsem (1963) is a consultant with large experience in Urban and Regional Planning, Landscape Planning, Infrastructure, Environmental Management and Integrated Strategies. He holds engineer and master degrees in City and Regional Planning, Landscape Architecture and Regional management. He is professor and lecturer at the Université Libre de Bruxelles / Faculty of Architecture and other universities in Belgium, France, Germany and Russia. He is author of several books and articles. Didier Vancutsem was ISOCARP treasurer between 1999 and 2006, and Bureau Member of the German ISOCARP National Delegation.

Abstract
Geodata and Land Use Planning: Challenges and Opportunities

ICT and spatial planning are interconnected. More and more, planning solutions are developed, using ICT technologies. Urban data sets have been developed in the past, focussing on several spatial levels: a lot of information and many tools. Maybe too much? Furthermore, urban and regional planning data sets are not aggregated so far. Thus it is very difficult to use them for any other purpose than for printing or simple publishing by the authorities that created them. Performing time series or comparative analyses on these data sets is not yet possible. Solutions have been developed in the past years: urbanAPIs, Data harmonisation based on INSPIRE, or plan4business. The plan4business project achieved a platform, which is responding to two main challenges:

1) the required integration and harmonisation, highly automated;
2) an ICT system that can efficiently answer complex queries over the diverse and complex planning data sets.