From academic modelling to market-ready insights
1. Overview
The Hamburg City Health Study (HCHS) is one of Europe’s largest and most advanced population health research initiatives. Tracking 45,000 residents across Hamburg, it explores how genetics, lifestyle, and environment interact to shape long-term health.
For Prof. Dr. Simone Kühn, a cognitive neuroscientist leading the environmental research stream, the environment wasn’t just context — it was a critical factor.
Her team set out to understand how the physical structure of cities — especially building height and density — might influence mental wellbeing and brain health.
To do it, they needed a resource that is just as essential in commercial projects as it is in science: scalable, reliable, high-quality data.
That’s where ONEGEO made the difference.
2. The Challenge
Connecting urban form to health outcomes at scale is no small task.
Despite growing awareness that urban environments influence mental health, most studies have lacked the data needed to measure these effects at the city scale.
The HCHS team needed detailed, building-level data across the entire city — yet faced challenges familiar to any large-scale spatial project:
- No consistent source of reliable city-wide 3D building height data
- Manual height estimations from imagery were labour-intensive and error-prone
- Without scalable, standardised data, their models couldn’t move forward
Delays, workarounds, and data gaps risk slowing research and limiting what questions can be asked in the first place.
The need was clear: a single source of truth for the built environment, ready to integrate into complex workflows without friction.
3. The ONEGEO Solution
After searching for alternatives and testing manual workarounds, Prof. Kühn’s team discovered ONEGEO. The dataset provided:
· Accurate, high-resolution building height data across all of Hamburg
· Clean, geospatially aligned files that integrated directly into the modelling workflow
Frictionless data is a strategic advantage — whether you’re modelling public health risks or making multimillion-dollar location decisions.
“The fact that ONEGEO data was shared with us and provided building height in an easily accessible fashion with good coverage made it easy for us to now treat it as a standard variable in our current and future analysis pipelines.”
— Prof. Dr. Simone Kühn, HCHS
4. What It Enabled
With ONEGEO’s building data in place, the HCHS research team could pursue a set of critical, high-impact questions — and open new frontiers for environmental health modelling.
As Professor Kühn puts it: “We strongly believe that environmental factors are often overlooked and still very meaningful. Humans have the tendency to fall prey to the so-called fundamental attribution error. That is they overestimate the importance of personality factors and underestimate the relevance of environmental factors when interpreting behaviour of individuals. That is why, in my opinion, many scientific fields (e.g. psychology, psychiatry, neurosciences) do not pay enough attention to the living environment of individuals.”
But the HCHS changed the paradigm:
Linking building height to brain health
The researchers linked living environment characteristics, such as proximity to taller structures, to indicators of mental health risks — including depression, anxiety, and variations in hippocampal volume observed through MRI scans.
While early analyses have surfaced compelling correlations, HCHS is designed as a long-term longitudinal study. Understanding the full influence of urban form on mental health will unfold over years as additional waves of data collection and analysis mature.
For strategy leaders in other sectors, this highlights a critical point: strong data foundations enable evolving insights over time, not just instant answers.
Multi-layered exposure modelling
By combining building height with environmental factors like air pollution and noise, alongside MRI and survey data, the researchers created rich, multi-dimensional exposure models.
Kühn says “I definitely think that building height should become a standard variable to be included when trying to characterize the immediate environment around the home address of participants in neuroscientific and public health research.”
Layering datasets is the future of spatial intelligence — whether you're tracking urban health or optimising asset placement.
Exploring sky visibility and stress
The team launched new research into how obstructed sky views, caused by taller buildings, might affect mental wellbeing. The ability to quantify sky openness enabled the team to explore how visual enclosure — how much of the sky residents can see from their homes — relates to emotional wellbeing and cognitive health.
These novel exposure metrics are shaping next-generation frameworks for urban liveability, ESG reporting, and wellbeing-oriented urban design.
Paving the way for real-time exposure studies
Building on HCHS’s spatial framework, Prof. Kühn’s group is now launching follow-up studies involving real-time GPS tracking and brain imaging at the Max Planck Institute.
Participants' location data is matched against the built environment to study how short-term environmental exposure patterns influence neural markers.
Again, these are multi-year, evolving studies — highlighting how early investment in reliable spatial data pays off across future innovation cycles.
Seeing What Others Miss
In every city, the structures around us shape patterns we can’t always see — influencing behaviour, wellbeing, and opportunity in ways that often go unmeasured.
The Hamburg City Health Study brought those hidden patterns into focus. By layering ONEGEO’s building data into one of Europe’s most advanced research models, it became possible to connect the built environment to human outcomes with unprecedented precision.
The true impact of this work — like all transformational projects — will unfold over years. But the foundation is already clear: The value lies not just in what the data describes, but in what it makes possible:
- Asking better questions
- Building deeper models
- Moving faster from complexity to clarity
When environments are the variable, seeing clearly is everything.
And when decisions depend on the invisible details of the world around us — precision, scalability, and trust in the data become the greatest competitive advantages.
ONEGEO helps turn static maps into living insights — revealing the spaces where strategy, risk, and human experience meet.
6. Key Takeaways
- ONEGEO provided immediate value by removing data bottlenecks
- Building height became a standard variable in advanced spatial modelling
- The data enabled new hypotheses and measurable outcomes
- Proven use at city scale, under rigorous scientific conditions
Ready to move faster with spatial intelligence?
Whether you’re solving for liveability, access, resilience, or ROI — ONEGEO gives you the data to get there.
Contact us to learn more.
