Create Smart Cities and Communities with ArcGIS Urban

What is ArcGIS Urban?

ArcGIS Urban is an web-based 3D experience designed to improve urban planning and decision-making. Quickly visualize projects in your local context and leverage location intelligence to drive better decisions. Be more proactive and less reactive in your planning process and simplify project collaboration for public and private stakeholders. ArcGIS Urban is a system of web-based tools focused on simplifying the complex zoning process and can help stimulate private investment and support development to achieve a desired community vision.


Utilizing a 3D Basemap

With an interactive 3D basemap, your planners, developers, and stakeholders can better understand the scope of development around the community. In this example we see Boston, a city that collaborated with Esri, to create the buildings directly from LiDAR data. Boston also incorporated their tree survey data to visualize the trees that cover their city. It's important to note that the data doesn't have to be perfect, just use the best available data.

Plans

Plans usually consist of zoning boundaries and parcels that focus on larger, long-term redevelopment and rezoning takings (around 5-50 years). Defined through estimated targets like predicted population, households and jobs created, planners and developers are able to predict and meet target goals set by changing / editing new and existing zoning, adding new building use types, incorporating new overlay districts, and even combining or splitting parcels.

Projects

A project is usually a short-term development on a parcel (around 1 to 5 years). Usually color coded and associated with a status, like "Under Review" or "Approved", it's constantly updated throughout the development cycle to keep everyone up-to-date. With the ability to incorporate scenario-based modeling, users can view and edit different developments in real time and decide what fits within your cityscape.

Indicators

Indicators provide you with understanding about your work and your city. There are multiple types of indicators in Urban, each offering insight and analytics. Custom Indicators are created from custom data layers to provide context about your urban environment, Living Atlas Indicators are out-of-the-box indicators based off of Living Atlas datasets, Capacity Indicators are built-in indicators that provide information for impact analysis, and Design Context Indicators that use custom data layers to provide context for design decisions.


Getting Started

In order to get started with creating an ArcGIS Urban dataset, we have a three step process that will help you implement Urban into your community!

Step 1: Integrate your system of record for zoning, plans, and projects

In order to get started, Urban first requires certain data to work. What you'll need is:

  1. 3D buildings and trees for the 3D context
  2. Any projects (short term activity, like real estate development and capital improvement projects).
  3. Any plans (long term activity like rezoning and redevelopment).
  4. Zoning shapefile and zoning data (including building setbacks, max height, etc.)
  5. Parcel shapefile with unique parcel ID’s
  6. Street centerlines
  7. (Optional) Any overlays, like building height overlays, floodzones, etc. 

Step 2: Create and collaborate on plans, projects and indicators

Because each instance of Urban will be unique to whatever location, we want to see what cool development is going on in your area! Decide on a few plans, projects, or indicators that are important in your community, and input them into Urban! When you decide on a few of your important proposals, go inside of Urban and create what is going to be there to be easily shared throughout your team.

Step 3: Establish shared views and engage your community

Because ArcGIS Urban allows everyone to engage in the planning design process, its easy to share with anyone and everyone. Share the instance with your website, through emails, embed your Urban model into your website, whatever you do to reach out to your community! Let them view your projects, plans, and indicators and hear from their feedback.


Questions? Want to learn more?

Want to request more information on ArcGIS Urban? Have any questions? We are more than happy to provide any assistance! Fill out the form below to get in contact with one of our experts.