urbanLab: Spatial data center for evidence-based city planning

Until recently, researchers only had access to spatial data on municipality, parish, or postal code level. However, even within small postal codes, there is a large variation in the residential composition across neighborhoods. This leads to ecological fallacy. Consider how a response to challenges in our society such as the global pandemic depends on socioeconomic factors. Then conclusions on a coarse spatial resolution may be misleading regarding the actual dependence at the level of individuals. 
Having access to recently available 100 x 100-meter grid cells combined with data on the entire Danish population, we have the potential to design tailored interventions for local communities, thereby avoiding the ecological fallacy and the resulting bias in political decision-making. 
However, this setup contains over 350 million data points requiring new mathematical and statistical tools for our analysis and hypothesis testing.
This project aims to establish a research center that drives forward the development of mathematical and statistical tools for the analysis of detailed spatial data and to become an international platform for empirical research producing applicable knowledge that contributes to evidence-based city planning.