Planmonitor NOVI, where building plans meet vulnerable land

19 June 2023

PBL published Planmonitor NOVI 2023, by Rienk Kuiper, Bart Rijken and Bas van Bemmel, which asks a plain question: if the plans on the table are built, what happens to the areas that are vulnerable to being built on? Nature, landscape, cultural heritage, water safety, soil subsidence, drinking water extraction.

Provincial plan registers alone could not answer it, because they are incomplete and do not cover the country in the same way. The RuimteScanner filled the gaps, producing one national picture of possible urbanisation that could then be laid over the maps of vulnerable areas. The differences between regions turn out to be large: in Drenthe some seventy per cent of possible urbanisation falls in vulnerable areas.

This was one of the first applications of RuimteScanner 2.0, and of the open version, RSopen.