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Adam Swietek
PhD at EPFL
Adam Swietek is a PhD student at EPFL's Laboratory of Environmental and Urban Economics (LEURE), focusing on the intersection of digitalization and decarbonization in the built environment.26 His research emphasizes automated design appraisal and visual landscape quality assessment, particularly through tools like the Visual Capital Web App to evaluate building-level visual metrics at scale.53
Key Background
- Education: PhD in Economics (EPFL), Master’s in Real Estate Development (Columbia University), and Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering (Georgia Tech).6
- Professional Experience: Roles include Data Scientist at Wüest Partner, Research Intern at MetaProp.vc, and Project Management Analyst at Faithful+Gould.6
Research Contributions
- Visual Landscape Quality: Developed methods to quantify visual quality using 3D digital twins, enabling building-level assessments for urban health and real estate valuation studies.53
- Real Estate Valuation Risk: Presented work on modeling devaluation risks due to land-use changes at the Spatial Statistics 2023 conference.13
- Open Data Initiatives: Advocates for democratizing view metrics through projects like visualcapital.xyz, funded by the EU Horizon 2020 program.54
His work bridges spatial statistics, urban economics, and property technology (proptech), with publications in journals such as Landscape and Urban Planning and Sustainable Cities and Society.35
Highlights
Land-use and Zoning reform is the primary tool cities have to address affordability and resilience challenges. However, insurance markets don't cover market risk posed by new development, making densification policies vulnerable to groups who collectively oppose it (NIMBYs) over concerns about property devaluation.
In a new paper, I introduce Automated Design Appraisal (ADA) and the methods to integrate estimated market value within architectural design optimization techniques. ADA is used to evaluate the property value-at-risk due to the negative spillover effects of proposed nearby development on amenity values, demonstrating that planners can identify site-locations and design-choices that (1) minimize negative impacts on nearby property values and (2) maximize the value of the site of interest.
'Automated Design Appraisal' is published in Sustainable Cities and Society, check it out here:
Can we use 3DGIS (or Digital Twins) to inform real estate investments and valuations? Determine the scarcity of a Lakeview? or the income needed for a high quality view?
Pleased to share my article on ‘Visual Capital’ published in Landscape and Urban Planning. I use Switzerland’s massive 3D geodatabase to learn the attributes of a good view. The #GeoAI approach results in a hyper local income-derived index, a building’s Visual Capital. Future applications could use the scalable method to improve mass appraisal models (AVMs), inform site selection, and assess risk by simulating land-use change.
Big thanks to my co-author Marius Z., and to Jacqueline Schweizer and her team at Wüest Partner for their generous support.
Link to article: https://lnkd.in/ebBCgq65
#UrbanAnalytics #RealEstateValuation #3D
