Hosted by Arcadis on 17 September, the event brought together geospatial, planning, property and housing professionals to explore how better evidence, collaboration and technology can accelerate housing delivery.
Following a welcome from Simon Nigh and Richard Flemmings, Ashley Turner of Arcadis examined the pressures undermining development viability – from construction inflation and constrained supply chains to regulation, planning requirements and Bristol’s brownfield and city-centre premium. His message was practical: coordinated design, fairer sharing of inflation risk and a stronger forward pipeline can help the sector regain control.
Stephen Croney of Esri UK demonstrated the power of place-based thinking. By connecting housing, land, transport and infrastructure information, GIS can provide the shared evidence needed to identify sustainable growth locations, plan infrastructure and turn spatial strategies into deliverable outcomes.
Sarah Chilcott and Peter Kemp challenged the community to look beyond digital interfaces and focus on the value, ownership and accessibility of planning data. They highlighted the need for a sustainable model that protects the public interest, enables innovation and returns value to the organisations creating and maintaining the data.
Colin Henderson of AtkinsRéalis introduced Land4UK: a vision for connecting fragmented land, planning, constraints and delivery information through a common evidence layer. Lessons from London showed that successful platforms depend as much on governance, shared ownership and data stewardship as they do on technology.
Finally, Gonzalo Marquesini of RenKap showed how accessible, structured on-site data can remove friction from land assessment and housing delivery. Digitising the fragmented survey process can help teams identify risks sooner, assess more sites and bring developable land forward with greater confidence.
Now we need the community’s voice
The event made one thing clear: no single organisation can resolve these challenges alone. We need planners, housing providers, local authorities, developers, surveyors, consultants, PropTech businesses and geospatial specialists to help identify:
- where viability, cost and planning barriers are preventing delivery;
- which land, property and housing data remains inaccessible or fragmented;
- where shared standards, governance or infrastructure would make the greatest difference;
- which real places, problems and datasets could support practical pilot projects; and
- how the AGI Housing Network can convene the right people and turn ideas into action.
Tell us what is holding delivery back – and what we should tackle together first. Share your priorities, propose a use case, contribute a dataset or volunteer to support future events. The network will shortly invite feedback through a community questionnaire; members can also contact our AGI Member Support on info@agi.org.uk to get involved.
AGI Members can login and view the event presentations and photographs