Professor Christopher Pettit

Chris Pettit is Scientia Professor and Director of the City Futures Research Centre UNSW – an internationally renown institute which has been conducting scholarly applied public interest research on our cities since 2005. Prof Pettit is also the current Chair of the Board of Directors for CUPUM (Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management) the premier international academic forum (30 years old) at the intersection of digital technologies, data science, urban planning and city shaping. He is global advisor to PGIM’s RealAssetX Lab. He is a member of the Planning Institute of Australia’s National Plantech Advisory Committee, the Federal Government of Australia’s Urban Policy Network and the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) Scientific Committee.

Prof Pettit’s expertise is in the convergence of the fields of city planning and digital technologies including Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Planning Support Systems (PSS). He has published 200 + papers, given numerous keynote addresses at conferences around the world and is according to the Stanford-Elsevier 2024 ranking is one  of the top 2% scientists in the world. He is on editorial board for several Journals including Computer Environment and Urban Systems, Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, and Urban Findings. Over the last 25 years he has been conducting research on the utility and usability of geographical visualization tools; data-driven approaches to future city scenarios. He is the inventor of a number of planning support systems.

Prof Pettit established the City Analytics Lab (CAL) in 2018, a dedicated space designed to support collaborative city planning and user-centred design which has hosted over 350 workshops, tours, and classes with more than 4,000 participants. He has led a number of high impact projects including Value Australia- Sharpening our land and property decisions with Artificial Intelligence and the Rapid Analytics Interactive Scenario Explorer (RAISE) Toolkit. Value Australia has won 6 awards for innovation and impact and in 2021 was established as a joint venture company with PEXA, FrontierSi and UNSW.  Prof Pettit has lead the Australian Housing Data Analytics Platform which has launched the National Housing Data Exchange portal, Colouring Cities interactive city mapping platform, and several digital workbench tools including: What if?, Envision, the Australian Housing Market Explorer, and the Australian Housing Affordability Tool. Prof Pettit is also founder of MapAI, a recent startup which aims to democratise geospatial analysis via a simple mapping and chat interface. MapAI was the recipient of 2 awards at the NSW Geospatial Excellence Awards 2024.