masterplanning
ArcGIS Geodesigner or Planning Engine? What’s in a name?
UPDATED on the 16/05/2012 – I’ve updated this article as I got it completely wrong, scroll to the bottom to find out more…
I’ve been thinking about how ESRI will integrate CityEngine with ArcGIS… either they are going to embed CityEngine functions within the core product, not ArcGIS basic but maybe standard or pro versions. Perhaps as a procedural modeller toolbox? Alternatively they are going to produce an industry specific product.
Personally I hate products being chopped up for different industries (I’m looking at you Autodesk and Adobe), but in some cases it can make sense. For example urban designers have different requirements to geologists, so why would they want the same tools or have to pay for them? Of course I would point point out that limiting features based on profession can mean we won’t be able to learn from others!
Personally I think the name CityEngine is limiting your product, this is a procedural modeller which can just as easily do trees and agriculture as houses and skyscrapers. So what will it be ESRI?
My choice? ArcGIS Planning Engine…. what’s yours?
UPDATE
Okay I got it completely wrong if anything it won’t be ArcGIS Planning Engine, it will be ArcGIS Geodesigner and here are a few reasons why:
- Geodesign Wiki
- Geodesign by ESRI
- Geodesign Summit
- Geodesign Gathers Momentum
- Can Geodesign Help Us Adapt to Climate Change?
- Spatial Roundtable : GeoDesign for Climate Change Adaptation
So will it be this?
Posted in 3D, ArcGIS, City Creation, CityEngine, esri, geodesign, GIS, masterplanning, planning, urban design | No Comments »
ArcGIS CityEngine Templates
Finally the ArcGIS resource center is starting to get some templates to help you through the workflows from ArcGIS to CityEngine!
You can visit the CityEngine Templates section here.
Posted in 3D, ArcGIS, City Creation, CityEngine, esri, geodesign, geography, masterplanning, planning, urban design, Visualisations | No Comments »
Digitizing the Informal
I’m doing some digitizing for a project in the office, basically I’m plotting the entire road network in a city environment. This sounds easy doesn’t it? Just plot the thick black lines and you’re done. Well this is a country with a hot desert environment and a poor quality road network. To compound matters there is a high water table, and places where there is no underground sewer network.
Informal Road Networks - but how do you record them?
The upshot of this is there are many informal road networks, even in the ‘developed’ neighbourhoods. It’s quite easy sometimes to make a good guess as to the line of a road based on the housing. But the road accessing a particular development can be erratic taking account of features and circumstances I cannot see from my satellite image (soft sand for instance). What’s more how am I to know that this is a permanent road? Sure it looks fairly set now but come the next season it will all change.
My general approach is to first establish what kind of project I’m working on and what information is required for the job. Here I am choosing to acknowledge the existence of these informal tracks, especially the ones that look heavily used. I’m also ensuring that the lines I’m creating have appropriate information about the feature for instance: “informal, access, unmade”. I’ll also add some meta data to ensure anyone in the future who finds my work knows what satellite image I digitized from and what date I plotted it and for what purpose.
So fellow GIS professionals (particularly the ones that like to digitize) how do you digitize yours? I’d really appreciate your insight if you could leave a comment or dm me on twitter that would be great!
Posted in geography, GIS, maps, masterplanning, planning, satellite, tips, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment »
The Future? The Instant City.
Following on from my last post about ESRI’s purchase of CityEngine, what next? Well I already presented at the ESRI UK Annual Conference 2011 about how the computer game industry is influencing our work. These were two presentations were linked by CityEngine: “The 10 Minute City” and “Games and the City”. My goal (if they will allow me!?) next time is to present again but something called the “Instant City”, inspired by Charles Kennelly’s presentation on Real-Time GIS.
This would show how using rules in CityEngine all stages of a master planning process can be started at once. This sounds strange but at present we start with background studies and evolve that into a number of growth options for a city and from that the client chooses. This happens over months if not years! The problem with this approach is that early on the client chooses their direction of growth, but what if the situation changes? It’s going to be costly and timely to start again.
What I envisage happening in the future is that CityEngine and ArcGIS (and I thought about this pre-acquisition!) can be harnessed together to allowing multiple versions of a city master plan to go through all at the same time. Then the client could choose at the end of the process a complete package knowing all its implications in terms of the Building Information Modelling (BIM) type of information.
Essentially you could start with a blank sheet knowing how many people you need to plan for, as time goes by more information is delivered existing roads, terrain, obstacles etc.. and as each data layer is imported into the GIS the CityEngine rules you have created run over it again and within your defined parameters remake the proposed city/growth area.
One idea was also to take solar data and use that as the basis for orientating buildings in CityEngine, so with a clever rule whole buildings could be orientated automatically depending on their location in relation to the sun, even in a valley!
The concept is simple but it requires lots of computing power, but I think we’re approaching now a time when computing power is a product of how many machines in the cloud you can afford to have working on a problem. The Instant City idea relies on cloud computing (or a very powerful computer) to make it a reality.
Another thought I had was that it would be good to have some kind of large visual display at the ESRI conference and some PC’s around it. Attendees could contribute to the design process of a city by adding data (satellite imagery, obstacle maps, roads etc..). As each layer was placed in the model, CityEngine would update the city model and ArcGIS would in turn update its analysis (pie graphs etc…) all in real-time.
It’s all ideas at the moment and I would need some help (hint?) but it would be a great experiment and show off the capabilities of this new partnership. At the end of the conference we could have a fully functioning city created with all the analysis completed by ArcGIS and in 3D. What if the attendees for example could download the city and run around it in a game type environment as well (Crysis anyone?)?
Apologies for the somewhat dumping of conciousness there but I thought I should get it out there in writing. I would be interested to know what any of you though about it? Suggestions, queries, comments? Add a comment, send me a DM on twitter or email me!
Posted in ArcGIS, City Creation, CityEngine, masterplanning, planning, Uncategorized | No Comments »
ESRI acquires Procedural – Master Planning & Urban Design just got easier?
Yesterday at ESRI’s annual user conference in San Diego, Jack Dangermond announced the acquisition of Procedural, the maker of an “up and coming” piece of software called CityEngine that I’ve talked about quite a lot on this blog…
My reaction to this news is enthusiastic I already use ArcGIS in our Urban Design and Master Planning projects extensively. I’ve been also looking at using CityEngine to speed up the process of master planning as well as other related urban projects. Better integration with ArcGIS will be great for us. I’m also looking forward to a more mature product at the next release with support for GeoTiffs at the top of my most wanted list.
From the moment I downloaded the trial of CityEngine (thanks to blog post in DigitalUrban) I saw that this program had huge potential on many levels for my industry. The key to its usefulness, for me, is it’s ability (or potential ability) to deal with the macro to micro scale of planning. For example I can get it to grow a region wide street network from obstacle maps and an existing network, but within that and dependent on your rule files I can zoom into building level and have a particular piece of street furniture outside a building. The possibilities are endless, honestly, and the complexity of your model is only as complex as your rule files. I can quite quickly make a convincing looking city for master planning purposes provided I put the time into the rule files that govern your model.
At it’s simplest level you can specify lot sizes very easily (provided your area is bounded by a road network). This means that for some traditional ways of working (I’m talking AutoCAD plotting), has been dramatically reduced. For a small company like the one I work for, where everyone has multiple jobs (I’m the CAD technician as well on master planning projects!) this is essential for us to remain competitive.
The future of certain urban based modelling, especially in master planning I see as two fold:
- Most of the drawing of urban areas will now be governed by text based rule files and drawn automatically using CityEngine methods. Much of the time consuming processes involved in designing a new city will be reduced to a tiny amount of the project time.
- Design becomes more prominent in the process as time freed doing the manual work of plotting cities is replaced by CityEngine. I think what we will see is design codes and planning standards used as templates to create rule files that can be changed very quickly. When it comes to, for example, detailed studies for a master plan we as master planners will have much more time to actually design. By that I mean instead of putting time into plotting in AutoCAD lots, plots and districts we will actually be able to design key buildings and other pieces of the urban fabric.
Posted in ArcGIS, autocad, City Creation, CityEngine, GIS, masterplanning, planning, Uncategorized | No Comments »
ESRI UK Conference – My Presentations
My first presentation on Day One was entitled the “10 Minute City” to a largish group of people who made the trek to the basement instead of hearing about exciting developments in ArcGIS 10.1. Honestly, thank you for coming down and listening to us all, not just myself. VIDEO TO VIEW HERE After initial issues relating to my video not playing on ESRI laptops and codecs (I’ve never figured out codecs all I can say is it worked on my PCs and their offices ones too).
Here I demonstrated a workflow that used CityEngine and ArcGIS as the pivot points in creating a very basic city model for visualisation and analytical purposes. I hope this went down well and if people have any more questions about it (I know I skipped some of the detail) then please don’t hesitate to contact me.
My second presentation entitled “Games and the City” was to a much smaller audience, I gave a live demonstration and an insight into a workflow we’ve been looking at using specially built software with assistance of InfoLab21.
My quick quiz about what game and system this screen shot was from got no correct answers unfortunately (and I was going to give the person who guess correctly a snazzy GDL memory stick!).
Perhaps you would like to guess? (answer in the comments below, no prize though sorry!)
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| Source: RetroGamer.net |
Both presentations should be available to upload from the ESRI site soon, I’ll also try and post it here soon.
Apologies to those of you who saw the presentation and saw it stall at one stage. I’ll blame it on the lack of a mouse mat, the awkward position of the mouse on the podium oh and my shakey hand due to nerves!
Posted in 3D, City Creation, conference, datasets, dwf, dwg, esri, Featured, geography, GIS, masterplanning, planning, Visualisations | No Comments »
An interesting day at the office: #GIS & #masterplanning in #Iraq
Introduction
The Westmorland Gazette ran today with a news piece about a project I’ve been working on at Garsdale Design Limited . It’s been a really interesting project and a wonderful to know that our work from a very small family firm in Cumbria can have the potential to make such a big difference for people.
We’ve been working on the master planning project for Nasiriyah (a city in Southern Iraq, Dhi Qar) for over two years now, and you may have got hints from this blog that I was working on something interesting!
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| Iraqi Planners in Kendal |
Training
We also held training sessions here in the UK (in Liverpool) for the Iraqi planners that will eventually take ownership of the master plan. This was a great opportunity to meet town planning and local government professionals from a very different environment. Despite all the sad stories that news organisations like to print about Iraq they were all very upbeat confident professionals who wanted nothing but the best for their country. It was a very positive and friendly experience for both parties.
As we are a small firm everyone needs multiple skills outside their specialisms. I maybe a planner but I’m also the IT guy responsible for our website/social networking, general systems and backup procedures as well as a projects GIS, I’m often involved in CAD and word/Indesign production as well. It’s not a boast its just what you have to do in a small team, and it certainly keeps you on your toes!
The Masterplan
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| Extract Map Nasiriyah, Dhi Qar, Iraq |
My involvement has been with the many aspects of the Planning standards, GIS and mapping as well some of the report writing.
I did the research of existing Iraqi standards and master plans (from mainly Polish firms in the 1980s) as well as helped create the new planning standards.
There were also instances where facts on the ground changed during the project for instance water and sewage treatment plants were being completed before whilst the project was just getting started! This was not a problem (but it did require some updates to the GIS!) as to wait for planners to figure out where best to site these plants would be unfair and harmful to the local population.
The GIS for Nasiriyah
Here in the UK I have managed and updated the GIS for the Nasiriyah project. It’s been a steep learning curve as although I know the capabilities of GIS and how it can add real value to a project some of the more technical/programming aspects I am not so familiar with.
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| Capture those GCPs! |
Our Iraqi partners (Iraqi Planners Group) did all the major surveying and photography in Iraq. They collected together large datasets and sent them to us as geodatabases (ArcGIS). Difficulties with the datasets were mainly down to language barriers. Our Arabic being ‘limited’ meant that we relied on their English skills and our use of Google Translate which sometimes led to confusing labels and fields. However we have close contact with our Iraqi counterparts and these were quickly ironed out.
Satellite Imagery was also purchased that covered Nasiriyah city’s existing size on the, this was georeferenced with appropriate Ground Control Points (GCPs).
Well that’s all for the moment about the project I’ve been working on obviously I can’t let you know everything but if you are interested you can visit Garsdale Design Limited’s website for experience sheets on the project.
I’ll just leave you with extracts of some the mapping I’ve done for the project…. it would be nice if people had questions or comments about any aspects of the project.
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| Early Landuse Map |
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| Issues with old Master Plan |
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| Time in Residence |
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