Vienna. A growing city in the heart of Europe

Vienna has recently been in the media for slipping down from first to twelfth place in the most livable cities in the world ranking.

However, this year's edition of this global city evaluation report is certainly a special one, as the results are strongly driven by the global pandemic. Of course Vienna is still a vibrant city offering outstanding conditions for its inhabitants to realize themselves and live a fulfilled life. Not without reason construction cranes can be currently observed all over the city as it is condensing in central areas and expanding on the city outskirts in order to provide living space for thousands of people migrating to the city each year.

With progressing urban sprawl, one question is getting more and more interesting for different stakeholders of urbanization processes: Where are individual cities expanding to? This question is for sure not easy to answer! Urban sprawl is driven by very diverse factors ranging from the presence of physical obstacles (e.g. lakes, steep slopes) to local socio-demographic and -economic development to political implications. So bottom line you need to have a sound knowledge about local conditions in order to be capable of estimating urban development directions and pace.

At ubicube we are working on an innovative service to provide actionable insights about urbanization trends on the global scale. From A like Auckland to Z like Zurich, our service can be deployed for every reasonably sized city! Based on huge amounts of archived (back to the early 1980s) and current satellite imagery from different sensors at different spatial resolutions, complex urban growth models and modern machine learning methods we learn from the past and project the detected urban development trends to the short-, medium-, and long-term future. Sounds like a crystal ball for real estate developers and urban planners, right? Well, maybe it is :-)