The biennial International Land Use Symposium brings together leading academics in the fields of GIScience and spatial planning. Objective of the interdisciplinary conference is to advance the understanding of built-up areas and to develop new ideas for sustainable urbanization. ILUS brings together leading academics and interested attendees for presentation, discussion, and collaborative networking in the fields of spatial sciences, environmental studies, geography, cartography, GIScience, urban planning, architecture, which relate to investigations of settlements and infrastructure. The symposium is organised by Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional development (IOER), Dresden, Germany and partners. ILUS 2025 stimulated an interdisciplinary debate on spatial dynamics in urban societies, particularly using geodata, analyses, modeling, and simulations. Conference contributions could be theoretical, methodological, or applied in nature. The debate covered the following topics: Critical landscape phenomena: habitat fragmentation, loss of biodiversity, animal movements, landscape permeability, urban spatial networks, accessibility, gravity approaches, scaling, spatial interactions Digital twins and decision-making: AI-based collection and modeling of spatial data, real-time information, enrichment of building data, citizen sciencewith a special session on infrastructure for spatial research data and generative AI Urban structure and policy: Structures and dynamics of cities, paths to sustainability for cities, causal inference, densification, suburbanization, interdisciplinary approaches to land policy, bridging quantitative and qualitative research.With a special session on “Urban dynamics in the Global South and North”
Behnisch et al. (Thu,) studied this question.