Object Vision Information

We build open spatial models and the software they run on, so that governments, planning agencies and researchers can see where housing, work, nature and services can go, what that costs, and what a policy choice would change. The RuimteScanner has supported Dutch national planning since 1997, at PBL and its predecessors. CRISP, developed with the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, produced the spatial projections behind the UN’s World Urbanization Prospects 2025. The WoonZorgwijzer, developed with partners, shows municipalities, housing corporations and care providers where people with care needs are expected to live. We work on land use, accessibility, population and urbanisation, housing and care, and energy in the built environment. We apply the models ourselves or hand them over to clients, and we build the web maps that let people explore a model and follow its logic. All of it runs on GeoDMS, our open-source modelling environment, in development since the 1990s. It calculates grids of hundreds of millions of cells on an ordinary Windows machine, and every result can be traced down to the source data. A model that informs policy should be open to inspection, not a black box. We grew out of a research programme at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the 1990s, and our office is still there. Since 2025 the company is owned by the people who work in it, through a cooperative. Projects, models and publications: objectvision.nl Documentation: geodms.nl Code: github.com/ObjectVision