Systematically Capture and Utilize Housing Potential

Focus on Digital Urban Planning

Digital methods are opening new pathways for urban planning: aerial images and laser scan data reveal where building gaps and vertical extensions are possible. The results are integrated into a QGIS plugin, helping municipalities like Münster quickly identify housing potential and make fact-based decisions.

More Housing Through Digital Potential Analysis

Like many municipalities, the city of Münster faces the challenge of creating additional housing. At the same time, the city has unused spaces—so-called building gaps—and buildings that could be extended vertically. To systematically make this potential visible, the city of Münster commissioned the development of a building potential register. The goal is to create a transparent, data-driven foundation for future urban planning decisions.

© Fraunhofer IGD
The image "Training Data for Building Gaps" contains an excerpt of the training data used for detecting building gaps. Manually marked building gaps are shaded in blue, areas excluded from development are highlighted in red, and green areas represent undeveloped spaces that will be further analyzed. The red/green distinction is initially based on ALKIS data and serves as the starting point for model training.

© Fraunhofer IGD
To determine the potential for vertical extensions, building heights are automatically measured from the point cloud.

© Fraunhofer IGD
To identify roof areas, the point cloud is intersected with building outlines from the open data offer of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.

© Fraunhofer IGD
This serves as the basis for calculating building height.

Artificial Intelligence Makes Hidden Spaces Visible

The core of the project is an AI-based method that automatically analyzes aerial images and laser scan data (point clouds). The resulting information is provided in standardized geospatial formats (GeoJSON) and integrated into a QGIS plugin. This provides the urban planning department of the city of Münster with a ready-to-use tool that reliably identifies both building gaps and potential for vertical extensions. The open-source approach also ensures high transferability to other cities and municipalities.

Planning Security for Municipalities – Benefits for the Population

The building potential register offers a significant simplification compared to previous manual surveys and heterogeneous data sources. It enables informed communication with the public and fact-based political decision-making in the housing sector. The developed solution is also intended to be made available to other municipalities in the long term. With the combination of artificial intelligence, geospatial data analysis, and an easy-to-use software plugin, the project makes an important contribution to digital urban planning and the creation of urgently needed housing.

Efficiently Implemented, Quickly Available

The project will begin in June 2025 and run for a period of seven months. Key milestones include the development of the QGIS plugin, the first installation at the city of Münster, and the final handover and presentation of results by the end of the year.