A research & innovation invitation · Derby 2026
What if information about land, planning, construction and buildings could follow the same site for its entire life — instead of being scattered, recreated and lost?
01 / The opportunity
Today, useful site information is spread across organisations, reports and project stages. Land Passport proposes a persistent digital identity that links those records, preserves their provenance and makes them reusable.
Planning records, title information, surveys, drawings and maintenance documents sit in separate places. Data is repeated, disconnected or difficult to verify.
One site identity links trusted sources, maps, BIM models and later performance records, while controlling who can see and update each item.
The original vision film
A short founder introduction is available on demand. The rest of this briefing is designed to be understood without watching a video.
Explore the full project02 / The concept, made simple
Select each phase to see how the same site record could grow over time.
Boundary, planning context, access, environmental constraints and initial development options.
Illustrative workflow, not a live council or Land Registry integration. Actual records would retain their source, verification status, permissions and update history.
03 / Interactive Land Passport
Rotate the model and switch between land, building and infrastructure views — within this briefing, without opening another page.
04 / Why Derby?
This proposal would complement, not replace, existing digital planning and research initiatives.
The opportunity is to test the individual site's whole-life record alongside existing city-scale visualisation and academic research.
Derby City Council uses a city-centre 3D model to assess the visual and design implications of relevant development proposals. Land Passport would investigate an additional, site-level information lifecycle.
Council's official digital twin information ↗The University's Derby's Urban Sustainable Transition (DUST) work employs GIS, computational modelling and immersive visualisation. Its built-environment researchers also examine BIM and sustainable construction — relevant foundations for a jointly evaluated site pilot.
University's DUST research ↗05 / A practical next step
A modest, measurable research pilot: start with one small housing site in Derby, build its passport from raw land, and test whether joined-up records improve real planning, design and asset decisions.
Connect public and permitted site data, capture data provenance, and compare feasible planning scenarios, risks and local impacts.
Link decisions, permissions, BIM information, inspections and construction change into a traceable design-to-as-built record.
Explore records for energy, equipment, warranty and future changes; use an existing occupied asset if the new site has not reached this stage.
The pilot, timescales and any funding route are subject to joint scoping, data rights, due diligence and eligibility. No organisation is shown as an agreed participant.
06 / Questions & answers
Short, direct answers for colleagues, reviewers and research assistants.
Land Passport is a proposed persistent Digital Land ID for an individual site. It links land, planning, construction and building records to one identity, connected to a digital twin, so information follows the site for its whole life instead of being scattered, recreated and lost.
A modest, measurable research pilot: start with one small housing site in Derby (indicatively 5–20 new homes), build its passport from raw land, and test whether joined-up records improve real planning, design and asset decisions. Site, scope and partners are still to be agreed.
It would complement it. Derby City Council uses a city-centre 3D model to assess the visual and design implications of development proposals; Land Passport would investigate an additional, site-level information lifecycle alongside that city-scale model and the University of Derby's DUST research.
The University for research design, ethics and independent evaluation; the Council for planning context, public data and feedback; a developer and landowner for a consenting site and project data; and the Land Passport team for the system concept, prototype and built-environment coordination. No organisation is shown as an agreed participant.
Time and effort spent finding or recreating site information; data completeness, traceability and reliability; the quality of planning and development-option comparisons; and the usefulness of digital handover and ongoing asset information.
No. It is an IFC-derived concept model of a demonstrator building. The land, landscape and service-network layers are illustrative and are not surveyed or verified as-built records.
An invitation to an initial conversation
I would welcome a short exploratory discussion about a suitable use case, research alignment and whether an evidence-led pilot is worth developing together.