Early Lessons from Adapting the Colouring Cities Framework for Graz, Austria

Building-level urban data are a key layer for sustainability analytics, city planning, cartographic representation, and urban digital twins.While open-data initiatives in Austria increasingly align with FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016), the reality of Austria's federated structure creates practical challenges for data integration and mapping at the national scale.Relevant datasets are scattered across national, regional, and municipal geoportals and catalogues.This fragmentation often leads to misaligned geometries, conflicting classifications, and different update frequencies, making it difficult to build reproducible cartographic or analytical workflows.As a result, the practical value of open urban data remains limited for researchers, practitioners, and public authorities.This paper presents early lessons from the establishment of Colouring Austria 1 , the Austrian implementation of the global Colouring Cities Research Programme 2 (CCRP), using Graz as the first pilot case.Designed to address spatial data fragmentation, the CCRP provides an open, reproducible architecture for collecting, verifying, and visualizing building-level data to support urban resilience research (Hudson, 2025).The primary objective of the pilot was to evaluate how heterogeneous Austrian urban datasets and AI-derived building attributes could be integrated into a standardized, building-level framework that supports sustainability analytics, rooftop energy assessment, and future urban digital twin applications.