Montréal-based WSP, a technology company with 110 offices around the world, has played a key role in developing a digital land-use evaluation platform called Land iQ, designed to simplify property analysis on a large scale.
WSP’s Australian office has partnered with two specialized organizations, technology start-up Giraffe, and Aerometrex, a geospatial technology company with which WSP has collaborated since 2015. Together, they bring a powerful mix of capabilities, including effective stakeholder engagement, holistic land use planning expertise, applied software engineering and a strong understanding of data science that has resulted in Land iQ.
The team has been appointed by the Australian New South Wales (NSW) Department of Planning and Environment for the first-ever application of Land iQ to support the implementation of the NSW government’s Strategic Land and Property Framework.
“This technology will help bolster the in-house capabilities of private sector organizations, ensuring consistency in data and methodologies across the public and private sectors, and support the further digitization of the planning and property sectors,” the NSW government said in a media release.
Land iQ will allow government agencies to search millions of properties, model development scenarios and conduct site checks within minutes, all powered by shared data.
Its features include a fast site search function that helps users quickly locate unused or vacant land, along with access to historical maps and high-resolution aerial imagery. It also enables users to generate quick due-diligence and site suitability reports with ease, helping governments to ensure land use is optimized for the benefit of communities, WSP says.
The platform serves as a single, unified data source, integrating over 200 spatial data layers with government databases, thus ensuring consistency across analyses. This will enhance the state’s efficiency, accuracy and co-operation in its property and land-use planning, WSP explains, allowing users in NSW governmental agencies to identify suitable sites for land evaluation or development through multi-criteria searches across the state’s eight million lots and properties.
It will also empower government agencies to assess the impacts and explore the opportunities presented by different land uses. This will cut site analysis work from days to just minutes, while also fostering teamwork by allowing different public agencies.
They will be able to collaborate on planning efforts by creating, sharing and evaluating land use scenarios through a standardized typology approach, enabling rapid assessment of how different land uses perform against one another and impact surrounding areas.
Accessibility and ease of use for all NSW government agencies has been front of mind. Importantly, Land iQ has also been built to be modular and extendable, allowing it to adapt to future requirements, while leveraging existing digital resources wherever possible to reduce duplication and cost.
“Traditional approaches to strategic planning of precincts are informed by exhaustive background studies, transport, urban design and public space strategies,” WSP says. “The NSW government is on the path to a modern whole-of-government approach to land use evaluation where decisions are based on standardized, data driven, shared information with optimized public benefits as the objective.”
Damien Cutcliffe, project director at WSP, told LaPresse in an interview that municipalities and private developers in NSW now have access to a goldmine of data and can skip steps from the very beginning of a project, such as soil analyses, since the information is already available.
“What used to take six months now takes a few days.”
Land iQ is currently being used by Property and Development NSW to lead the state government‘s Property Audit to analyse government land that could be used for more housing.
“The government is pulling every lever available to address the housing crisis,” it says. “We have developed an industry-leading platform that can help speed up the pre-planning process. It only makes sense that we make this critical tool available so that everyone can benefit.”
Land iQ is set to become a key tool for NSW’s future planning. It will move the State toward modern, integrated governance to guide land use evaluation, one that is grounded in standardised, data-driven and shared information, with optimised public benefit as the ultimate goal. Land iQ directly supports this transition away from traditional methods, providing a foundation for smarter, more collaborative planning decisions.
Beyond its immediate application within NSW Government, Land iQ also opens up exciting opportunities to extend its effectiveness to other governments pursuing improved land planning. WSP would like to license Land iQ not only elsewhere in Australia but around the world. Interest has reportedly been expressed by the Ontario government.
Although not being used in Canada as of yet, some of the issues Land iQ will address in Australia would sound familiar to Canadian governments at various levels as well as property developers. These include, for example, correct selection of regions that would be most conducive to rapid growth, have the least contamination, the lowest risk of flooding and would be best served by schools and hospitals.
Easier access to centralized digital data information has obvious benefits and will hopefully help governments in Canada at all levels meet the demands for new housing and supporting infrastructure. Australia is showing that it can be done.
John Bleasby is a freelance writer. Send comments and Inside Innovation column ideas to [email protected].
