- Colouring Cities Research Programme Lead
Polly Hudson is a visiting academic at CST, working with Professor Jon Crowcroft and Dr Falli Palaiologou. She leads the Colouring Cities Research Programme/CCRP (https://colouringcities.org), a decentralised, informal, open science/open spatial data platform network, managed by academic institutions across 20+ countries. The CCRP was set up to support free access to microspatial data on the built environment for use in UNSDG related placed-based problem-solving and cross country comparison; to also reduce research overlaps and costs, accelerate research through informal international academic collaborations, and promote generous spirited research. Polly was previously a senior research fellow at The Alan Turing Institute (CCRP host 2020-2025) and at UCL's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CCRP host 2014-19), and a visiting fellow at the Kellogg Centre for the Historic Environment, University of Oxford (2010). She continues to work on Colouring Britain prototype design briefs (https://colouringbritain.org) with Loughborough University's core technical team.
Polly trained as an architectural historian and furniture maker, working in the 1980s and 1990s in museum design, community planning and historic building site management. Between 1996 and 2001 she set up and ran the Building Exploratory charitable trust in London - a reproducible model for free-cross disciplinary, creative centres about the local environment built by and for local communities - where she designed the first iteration of Colouring Cities, in 1998, with technical support from LB Hackney. Advisory panel membership has included for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, English Heritage and The Royal Institute of British Architects, and board membership, the Crossness Engines Trust and the UK National Lottery (health, sport and environment charitable arm).
Publications
-
Remi Petitpierre, Isabella di Lenardo, Polly Hudson, Hendrik Herold, Katherine McDonough, Robert Hecht, Beatrice Vaienti, Christopher FleetJournal of Open Humanities Data, "A Layer of Late Victorian London: The Building Footprints from the 1:1,056 Ordnance Survey Map (1891-1896)" (accepted June 2026)
-
Teichmann, S., Hudson, P., Kim, M., Herold, H., and Hecht, R.: Uncertainty in Binned Building Construction Year Data: Comparing EPC and Crowdsourced Datasets, AGILE GIScience Ser., 7, 44, https://doi.org/10.5194/agile-giss-7-44-2026, 2026.https://agile-giss.copernicus.org/articles/7/44/2026/
-
Hawas, A., Hudson, P., Kim, M., Hatvani, L., Konieczny, M., Palaiologou, F., … Larimian, T. (2025). New approaches to comparing and visualising national energy rating data for buildings. Presented at the 11th Applied Energy Symposium: Low Carbon Cities & Urban Energy Systems (CUE2025), July 18-22, 2024, Kitakyushu, Japan. https://doi.org/10.46855/energy-proceedings-1189
-
Hecht, Robert & Hudson, Polly & Gavaldà, Oriol & Hawas, Allan & Palaiologou, Falli & Herold, Hendrik & Larimian, Taimaz. (2025). Colouring Cities: A network of open platforms to improve the availability of data on the building stock for research, government and society. 10.5281/zenodo.15336081.
-
Konstantinos Serraos, Athina Vlachou, Polly Hudson, George Panagiotopoulos, Epaminondas Tsigkas, Tom Russell, Falli Palaiologou, Vasiliki Charalampidou (2023), Colouring Athens: A crowdsourcing platform for the collection of data on Athens’ building stock. Innovative Urban Planning Approaches. Series Publications of the Urban Planning Research Lab NTUA, Vol (12). Konstantinos Serraos (ed.). Athens: Sakkoulas. Publications.
-
Hecht, R; Danke,T; Hendrik, H; Hudson, P; Hudson; Munke, M & Rieche, T, Colouring Cities: A Citizen Science Platform for Knowledge Production on the Building Stock - Potentials for Urban and Architectural History. 'Research and Education in Urban History in the Age of Digital Libraries' Third International Workshop, UHDL 2023, Munich, Germany, March 27-28, 2023, Revised Selected Papers
-
Roper, J; Hudson, P; Petersen, H; Pettit, C; Russell, T and Ng, M COLOURING_AUSTRALIA_A_PARTICIPATORY_OPEN_DATA_PLATFORM, 14th October 2022.
-
Hudson, P; Dennett,A; Russell,T, and Smith, D. ‘Colouring London: A Crowdsourcing Platform for Geospatial Data Related to London’s Building Stock. (Best paper GISRUK2019)
-
Roumpani, F; Hudson,P and Hudson-Smith, A. The Use of Historical Data in Rule-Based Modelling for Scenarios to Improve Resilience within the Building Stock The Historic Environment: Policy & Practice 9, nos 3–4 (2018): 328–345;
-
Hudson, P. Urban Characterisation; Expanding Applications for and New Approaches to Building Attribute Data CaptureThe Historic Environment: Policy & Practice 9, nos 3–4 (2018): 306–3270;
-
Using new technologies to analyse and forecast change in the building stock Hudson, P., Historic England. Conservation Bulletin 75 (March 16, 2016): 8–12.
Selected articles and links:
-
Danke, T., Hecht, R., & Hutter, G. (2025). Reflecting on the practice of citizen science projects for cities – the case of ‘Colouring Dresden’ in Germany. Urban Research & Practice, 18(1), 142–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2024.2424298
-
Ng, Matthew Kok Ming & Pettit, Christopher, 2021. "Digital Transformations in Planning: An Australian Context," SocArXiv 5k4sz, Center for Open Science.https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/5k4sz.html
-
Hecht, Robert & Rieche, Theodor Mit einer Citizen-Science-Plattform Gebäudewissen kartieren, erforschen und vermitteln und dabei klimagerechte Architektur unterstützen. gis.Business, 1, 34–36. (2023) https://doi.org/10.26084/pgvc-tx74
-
Krayem, Alaa, Aram Yeretzian, Ghaleb Faour, and Sara Najem. ‘Machine Learning for Buildings’ Characterization and Power-Law Recovery of Urban Metrics.’ PLOS ONE 16, no. 1 (January 28, 2021): e0246096;
-
Hecht, Robert, Hendrik Herold, Martin Behnisch, Mathias Jehling. ‘Mapping Long-Term Dynamics of Population and Dwellings Based on a Multi-Temporal Analysis of Urban Morphologies.’ ISPRS Int. J. Geo-Inf. 8, no. 1 (2019)
-
Tagesspiegel Background Smart City & Verwaltung: Best Practice. Colouring London Author: Madeleine Londene. Tagesspiegel newspaper. Berlin, January 2023
-
Open data platforms enable access to high quality national building footprint data G20 Global Infrastructure Hub Infratech case study, October 2022;
-
Harnessing the power of spatial data. Research pathway essay for Buildings and Cities, August 2022;
-
Case study for the Centre for Digital Built Britain, University of Cambridge, Gemini Principles - Colouring London_. January 2021;
-
Open Data Institute Friday lectures, June, 2019 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiJFvYjxSn0.
