Building Stories

Developing a geospatial model for vacancy to reveal the adaptive capacity of urban areas in Ireland.

Overview

Building Stories is a research project based at University College Dublin, jointly led by the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy and the School of Computer Science. The project addresses the pressing societal challenges of housing shortages, climate change, and town centre decline in Ireland by tackling inefficiencies in how building vacancy is understood and managed. Through the development of a geospatial model that integrates diverse datasets using GIS and AI, the project seeks to provide dynamic, reliable data at the scale of individual buildings. This data-driven approach aims to support public and private stakeholders in making informed decisions about the reuse of existing buildings, thereby enabling the delivery of homes, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and revitalising communities.

Building Stories is part of the National Challenge Fund which was established under the government’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), funded by the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility. The fund is coordinated and administered by Research Ireland.

Building Stories received funding between June 2023 and November 2024 and was one of 16 out of 96 teams selected for further funding from December 2024 to November 2025.

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Our Research Areas

Our research focuses on vacancy and adaptive capacity in the built environment, with a particular emphasis on geospatial data modelling. Using proxy datasets, GIS, and artificial intelligence, we aim to develop a comprehensive and dynamic tool that enables granular analysis of vacancy at the level of individual buildings and sites in Ireland.

The project bridges data science, urban planning, and digital technologies to reveal how urban areas can adapt more efficiently, sustainably, and equitably to meet housing needs, reduce carbon emissions, and revitalise town centres. This interdisciplinary research supports evidence-based decision-making and aligns with broader goals of the green transition, digital transformation, and citizen engagement in planning.

Expected Impact

We believe that good-quality data will lead to more efficient use and management of the built environment. There is an opportunity to utilise, leverage, and combine expertise and innovation in data science, data governance, digital technologies, citizen science, and planning in Ireland to better understand and address vacancy. This, in turn, can support public and private actors to:

Provide urgently needed homes
Reduce greenhouse gas emissions by minimising demolition and new construction—helping to meet the 51% reduction target by 2030 (relative to 2018 levels) and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050
Revitalise town centres to support sustainable communities and foster social cohesion

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Meet Our Project Team

Dr Philip Crowe

Principal investigator

Dr Philip Crowe is UCD Assistant Professor for Climate Responsive Design at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy (APEP) and the School of Civil Engineering.
He is the Director of Research at UCD APEP, co-director of the UCD Centre for Irish Towns, and Programme Director of the MSc in Architecture, Urbanism and Climate Action. Philip teaches in areas relating to carbon management, sustainability, urban resilience and urban ethics. As a researcher, he is working on a range of EU and nationally funded projects relating to town revitalization, vacancy and adaptive reuse, compact urban growth, and citizen participation in processes of change. Philip’s background is in architecture, and he was previously Director of Sustainable Design at M.CO (Dublin) from 2003-2012.

Dr Gavin McArdle

Co-Principal investigator

Dr Gavin McArdle is an Associate Professor at the UCD School of Computer Science.
He is also a Collaborator with CeADAR – Centre for Applied Data Analytics and a PI in CAMEO, a project building a national Earth Observation Data Platform. Gavin is also a PI on two Research Ireland projects: Bikehood and Building Stories. He was previously an SFI-funded Research Fellow at IBM Research. His research focus includes geographic information science, mobility, geovisual analysis, smart city technology, VGI and urban dynamics. Gavin has an extensive publication record, including edited books, book chapters, articles and research papers. He has been a keynote speaker at several international conferences and institutes and has received several grants from National and European Funding agencies to support collaboration with researchers in academia and industry.

Dr Rob Brennan

Collaborator/Assistant Professor

Dr. Rob Brennan is a Lecturer/Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin.
Rob’s main research interests are data governance, data quality, knowledge graphs, and AI governance. Rob is a Principal Investigator of the Research Ireland EMPOWER data governance spoke project. He is a Funded investigator in ADAPT, the Research Ireland Centre for AI-driven Digital Engagement, Rob leads the Value and Risk challenge in the Transparent Digital Governance research strand. He was the Principal Investigator on the ADAPT-Ordnance Survey Ireland project publishing Ireland’s reference geospatial data as Linked Data on the web and the ARK (Access Risk Knowledge) project.

Dr Anna Skoura

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr Anna Skoura is a Research Fellow at Lvl 1 in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy.
She has over 15 years of experience working in the field of architecture, conservation and urban design, both as a researcher and in professional practice. During her PhD in Architecture, Anna developed multi-disciplinary methodologies for mapping and evaluating urban heritage. She has worked in EU and UK-funded multi-disciplinary projects and her research interests lie in the reuse of the existing built environment and the promotion of inclusivity in decision making.

Dr Jack Kavanagh

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr Jack Kavanagh is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Lvl 1 in the School of Computer Science.
He has ten years of experience working on various historical research projects encompassing private NGOs, public institutions and local authorities. Previously he was a researcher in the School of History, UCD from 2022-3 and an occasional lecturer and tutor at the Department of History, Maynooth University from 2019-23. His expertise is in historical geography and the spatial relationship between institutions and the state.

Dr Madeleine Lyes

Postdoctoral Researcher

Dr Madeleine Lyes specialises in policy-oriented research and engagement towards the climate transition. As living lab lead at the UL/LCC Citizen Innovation Lab, she implemented community engagement strategies in several funded research projects including SMARTLAB (SEAI RDD), investigating opportunities for increased building smartness in the Irish energy transition. She is co-author of the Space Engagers report on the Town Centre Living Initiative with the Department of Rural and Community Development, developing policy recommendations to support the revitalisation of towns and villages across Ireland. As an engagement and research consultant, she developed strategies for town centre renewal and a new campus outdoor plan at University Hospital Limerick.

Orla Leyden

Research Scientist

Orla is a Research Scientist at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy. Orla’s background is in community development, research and local government where she served as an elected member of a Local Authority for twenty years, and five years on a Regional Authority. Orla holds an M.Litt. in Sociology and Politics from the University of Galway and an M.Phil. in Literary Translation from Trinity College Dublin. She is a PhD student in the School of Agriculture and Food Science, at University College Dublin. Her research explores the role of women in leading sustainable and transformative farming practices through Agroecology.

Rola Abu Hilal

Research Assistant

Rola is a Research Assistant at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy, and holds a Master’s in Architecture, Urbanism, and Climate Action from UCD. Her work centres on sustainable design, climate resilience, and adaptive reuse strategies to reduce embodied carbon, alongside community engagement and co-design practices. At the Spatial Dynamics Lab, she contributes to EU- and nationally funded projects that explore citizen participation in shaping the built environment and advancing low-carbon building practices.

Milo Dennehy

Research Assistant

Milo Dennehy is a Research Assistant in the School of Computer Science. Milo is a current student in the BSc City Planning and Environmental Policy programme, set to graduate in 2025. Before joining Building Stories, Milo was a research assistant in the School of Architecture, Planning and Environmental Policy at UCD. His research interests are in building geospatial tools that leverage machine learning and remote sensing techniques to enhance capacity and reduce the barriers to access to geospatial technology for local actors.

Darragh Redmond

Research Engineer

Darragh is a Research Engineer at the UCD School of Computer Science. He graduated from Dublin City University in 2022, having obtained a BA in Geography and History. Following on from this, he recently completed an MSc in Computer Science (Conversion) at University College Dublin.

Junli Liang

Research Engineer

Junli is a Research Engineer at the UCD School of Computer Science. He holds a Master’s in Data Analytics from DCU. He has a strong background in the field of Knowledge Graphs, web development with React, NodeJS, Django, etc, and DevOps. His work on this project focuses on Web dev and virtual machine administration.