{"id":34442,"date":"2018-06-24T23:55:26","date_gmt":"2018-06-25T06:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=arcnews&#038;p=34442"},"modified":"2023-08-04T16:47:52","modified_gmt":"2023-08-04T23:47:52","slug":"grad-students-reenvision-neighborhoods-future-using-3d-gis","status":"publish","type":"arcnews","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/arcnews\/grad-students-reenvision-neighborhoods-future-using-3d-gis","title":{"rendered":"Grad Students Reenvision Neighborhood\u2019s Future Using 3D GIS"},"author":1162,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[331,171,10512],"tags":[17662,361,351,17672],"arcnews_issues":[9332],"class_list":["post-34442","arcnews","type-arcnews","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3d","category-education","category-esri-cityengine","tag-3d","tag-blight","tag-planning","tag-urban-design","arcnews_issues-arcnews-summer-2018","arcnews_sections-your-work"],"acf":{"short_description":"Grad students used modern geospatial technology to redesign Atlanta\u2019s Old Fourth Ward and study urban design principles.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"In central Atlanta, Georgia, the Old Fourth Ward has been the site of several lagging and fruitless redevelopment projects since the mid-twentieth century. As such, it is an ideal neighborhood for urban design and architecture students to use as a case study to explore modern urban design techniques and learn new technology."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":34452,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Last spring, a group of graduate students in the urban design program in the School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte took on the challenge of reenvisioning the old urban renewal site\u2019s future. The main idea for this academic project was to learn about the design principles that were key to the City of Savannah, Georgia\u2019s effective redevelopment of its historic district\u2014something Atlanta was unsuccessful with decades ago when it built its civic center (now itself a subject of demolition) in the Old Fourth Ward, displacing more than 1,000 largely African-American households, wiping out existing street grids, and disrupting not only the physical structure of the land but also the social fabric of the community.\r\n\r\nIn addition, the class used this project to explore the potential of using modern geospatial technologies\u2014including ArcGIS Pro, the Local Government 3D Basemaps solution, Esri CityEngine, and ArcGIS Online\u2014to study the existing urban form, understand the current socioeconomic conditions of the Atlanta neighborhood, propose and examine design alternatives, and eventually help visualize potential scenarios for the future of the Old Fourth Ward.\r\n\r\n\u201cTo propose good urban design solutions, students need to first have a good understanding of the contexts of the project site and then have proper tools to allow them to develop and evaluate their proposals,\u201d said Dr. Ming-Chun Lee, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte\u2019s School of Architecture and the instructor of this urban design studio course. \u201cMany modern geospatial tools serve well for all these purposes.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":34462,"image_position":"left","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h2>3D Models, Virtual Reality, and Sharing<\/h2>\r\nStudents began the project by collecting GIS data about both the Old Fourth Ward and Savannah\u2019s historic district from online, open-source databases. To create a digital representation of the existing urban structures for the two areas, the students built a series of basemaps by combining datasets into layers in both ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro. They then generated detailed 3D models for the two sites that displayed existing buildings and trees and contained accurate terrain.\r\n\r\nTo construct the 3D models, the students used ArcGIS Pro to extract 3D features from lidar point cloud data, which came from the United States Geological Survey\u2019s (USGS) EarthExplorer. They then employed the Local Government 3D Basemaps project package in ArcGIS Pro to process all the reclassified lidar tiles and extract the buildings and trees in 3D. This produced digital terrain models (DTMs) as TIFF files, which represented the bare, ground-level terrain for the Old Fourth Ward and Savannah\u2019s historic district.\r\n\r\nThe class then used CityEngine to enhance the visual quality of the resultant 3D models. They added details such as architectural structures and textures, landscape features, street markings and pavement, transportation features, vehicles, and human figures. The students implemented additional light effects as well to augment the level of realism in the models."},{"acf_fc_layout":"quote","image":34532,"text":"To propose good urban design solutions, students need to first have a good understanding of the contexts of the project site and then have proper tools to allow them to develop and evaluate their proposals.","author_name":"Dr. Ming-Chun Lee","author_profession_organization":"Assistant Professor, University of North Carolina at Charlotte\u2019s School of Architecture"},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"To do all this, the students first used ArcGIS Pro to package the needed GIS datasets\u2014the lidar-extracted 3D buildings and tree points, the DTMs (as TIFF heightmap files), streets, building footprints, and aerial photos of the sites\u2014in a file geodatabase. After importing the GIS datasets into CityEngine, the students used its Polygonal Street Creation tool to generate streets based on the types of streets they had identified at both sites, including major thoroughfares and local roads. All the data associated with the streets\u2014such as vegetation, signs, pavement, vehicles, and human figures\u2014were added using Esri\u2019s Complete Street Rule Package, which is available via ArcGIS Online. The class then employed Esri\u2019s Building Construction rule set to generate 3D buildings with architectural details and textures.\r\n\r\n\u201cHaving all this in CityEngine, as well as the data preparations done in ArcGIS Pro, allowed the students to create large-scale city models to visualize existing urban structures, in addition to proposed urban design solutions,\u201d said Lee. \u201cThese models also helped students examine and compare the spatial qualities of the Old Fourth Ward and Savannah\u2019s historic district.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":34482,"image_position":"right","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"But there\u2019s more to modern geospatial technology that the students aspired to discover. So they explored their urban design solutions using virtual reality (VR). To do this, they had to export their CityEngine models as FBX files before importing them into a game engine called Unity to create their VR scenes. Unity allows users to implement additional light effects and has a number of environment-rendering options\u2014such as movement speeds and view angles and heights\u2014to enhance the appearance of the models even more. It also has VR settings that let users use a typical game controller, such as an Xbox controller, to walk virtually around the 3D scenes originally generated in CityEngine.\r\n\r\nFinally, to conclude the project, the students took advantage of ArcGIS Online to share their data and graphic contents with each other. They generated web maps and 3D web scenes\u2014which included detailed streetscapes, buildings, and spatial analysis results\u2014to visualize and explore various urban structures and design solutions. Once they had everything in ArcGIS Online, the students also used Esri Story Maps app templates to present their project outcomes. The story maps contain various forms of media\u2014such as photos, graphs, diagrams, text, interactive maps, and 3D scenes\u2014that reveal, in a narrative way, the urban structures of Atlanta\u2019s Old Fourth Ward and the historic district in Savannah.\r\n<h2>Riding the Wave of New Geospatial Trends<\/h2>\r\nThis class exercise offered students an opportunity to explore new geospatial tools and visualization media while studying urban design in a more encompassing, engaging way."},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":34492,"image_position":"left","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"\u201cI believe that being able to get a better handle on location-based knowledge and further incorporate it into actual physical design strategies will really help urban designers connect to the place and the people of the place and, in turn, develop solutions that will have real impacts and generate satisfying results,\u201d Lee added.\r\n\r\nBy employing 3D GIS modeling, lidar data processing, cloud-based GIS, and VR to real-world contexts, urban design students at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte got to ride the wave of many major trends in geospatial development early on in their careers.\r\n\r\nAs these digital tools continue to advance, urban planners, designers, and researchers will need to fully understand them so they can establish workflows that move their ideas forward and promote pioneering solutions to city planning problems. By even just improving the integration of mapping, modeling, and visualization capabilities, modern geospatial technologies are effective tools for envisioning the future of local neighborhoods.\r\n\r\nFor more information about this project, email Lee at <a href=\"mailto:Ming-Chun.Lee@uncc.edu\">Ming-Chun.Lee@uncc.edu<\/a> or call 704-687-0137."}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Grad Students Reenvision Neighborhood\u2019s Future Using 3D GIS | Summer 2018 | ArcNews<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Grad students at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte used modern geospatial technology\u2014including ArcGIS Pro and Esri CityEngine\u2014to redesign Atlanta\u2019s Old Fourth Ward and study urban design principles.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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