Willem Schermerhorn was a strange figure to start a development school. A geodesy professor who became prime minister in 1945, he had been interned as a hostage by the German occupiers from 1942 to 1943 and emerged convinced that postwar reconstruction needed technical capacity more than political rhetoric. After leaving office he returned to his real passion - aerial photogrammetry, the science of pulling measurements out of photographs taken from above - and persuaded the Dutch government to back an international training centre. His students would not be Dutch. They would be the engineers and surveyors of countries still finding their feet in the postwar world. Enschede, a quiet textile city in the eastern Netherlands, became the unlikely classroom for cartographers from Bogota to Bangkok.

The institute's name changed as its tools did. Aerial photography gave way to satellite imagery, then to GPS and radar interferometry, then to the geo-information science that today underpins everything from disaster response to municipal property records. ITC adapted faster than most institutions because its students forced it to. A class in Enschede might include a Kenyan working on rangeland management, an Indonesian mapping volcanic hazards, and a Bolivian charting glacier retreat - and each of them needed practical answers, not theoretical ones. The curriculum sprawled across eight domains: disaster management, earth sciences, geoinformatics, governance, land administration, natural resources, urban planning, water resources. The thread tying them together is the question Schermerhorn asked first: how do we see this place clearly enough to make decisions about it?

On 1 January 2010 the institute was folded into the University of Twente as its sixth faculty - but on unusual terms. Latin lawyers will recognize the phrase: faculty sui generis, a faculty of its own kind. ITC kept its international character, its English-language instruction, its applied focus on developing countries, and its identity. Most university mergers grind down what they absorb. This one specifically protected what made ITC strange. Today the formal name is University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), and the parentheses are doing a great deal of work - signaling that the old institute, the one Schermerhorn started, still exists inside the larger body.

Walk through any geo-information ministry in the Global South and you have a decent chance of meeting an ITC graduate. Siti Nurbaya Bakar, who studied at the institute in 1988, later became Indonesia's Minister of Environment and Forestry, where decisions about deforestation and peatland conservation pass across her desk. Wilber Otichilo, ITC class of 1982, served as a member of parliament in Kenya and helped lead remote sensing work for the African continent. Vishnu Nandan, an Indian-born alumnus from 2012 now based in Canada, was part of the MOSAiC expedition - the year-long Arctic drift in which the German icebreaker Polarstern froze itself into the polar pack to study climate change. From a classroom in Enschede to the top of the world is a longer journey than most degrees deliver.

The ITC building on Hengelosestraat in Enschede is a working campus rather than a monument - lecture halls, computer labs, dormitories, a cafeteria that smells of cuisines from every continent at lunchtime. The real architecture of the institute is the network of alumni it has woven across seven decades. Joint programs with the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing in Dehradun and Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta extend the classroom across oceans. Distance modules let a forester in Mozambique or a planner in Kazakhstan take an Enschede course without leaving home. What Schermerhorn built was less a school than a slow, patient global infrastructure for seeing the Earth clearly - and seventy-five years in, it is still being built.