What is ArcGIS Urban?

ArcGIS Urban is a 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. Simplify project collaboration across internal agencies and public stakeholders.

Design what-if scenarios

Visualize current conditions in 3D and design in context by integrating land use regulations into your preliminary design development. Enable designers to draw connections between physical and regulatory change through the quick generation of massing studies. Advance designs into masterplans through integration with leading design software platforms and data formats.

Support design decisions

Enhance your business with geospatial tools that can inform strategies with basic and advanced urban analytics. Align your technology with the leading GIS platform used in government agencies worldwide to quickly develop comprehensive and specific plans that are based on the existing zoning regulations. Bridge spatial and formal planning strategies to deliver data-informed designs.

Collaboration for consensus

Share interactive plans and provide on the fly scenario testing to improve collaboration among key internal and external stakeholders. Collaboration is made simple with project team members, city staff, and the public. Simplify your catalog of projects and plans for easy management, across many areas of interest. Communicate design intent to clients and deliver a new way to approach project collaboration.

Create specific area plans

Specific area plans can often be costly and time-consuming to develop. With Urban, users can digitally create, manage, and edit zoning and land-use plans within an opportunity area, like a neighborhood or downtown. Users can also measure indicators for different scenarios on the fly, as the scenarios are created or viewed. This lets planners reduce the time it takes to evaluate the impact of zoning and land-use changes in a study area, helping save money and resources.

Track building development and infrastructure

Urban provides an overview of every development project citywide. Users can see where projects are, distinguish them by size or type, view start and end dates, and check their status. By seeing all projects across the city in a single view, urban planners and developers can better coordinate their activities.

Manage zoning changes

Urban provides editing tools that let users modify zoning constraints in the browser. Users can also see how those changes address the city's needs for simplification, adaptability, and efficiency. This makes it easier to explore the effects of zoning changes (like rezoning and zoning variances) as users conduct zoning revisions or test proposals.

Conduct buildable land analysis

Planners can use Urban to help analyze buildable land supply and demand based on factors like population change, economic growth, and current zoning codes. This process is often mandated by state governments, so cities can evaluate their ability to accommodate population growth forecasts through opportunities for new housing development. By incorporating Urban in their buildable lands analysis workflows, planners can more easily assess whether zoning changes are needed to meet future demand.

Perform development or design review

With Urban, users can evaluate key indicators and compare the economic, social, environmental, and spatial impact of proposed scenarios. For example, when reviewing alternate designs, planners can measure added capacity for housing or jobs. This helps planners conduct more data-driven development and design reviews. Planners can also share metrics with citizens to provide transparency for development decisions.

ArcGIS Urban Suite

This includes both ArcGIS Urban and Esri CityEngine. ArcGIS Online is required along with a Creator (or above) User Type to use ArcGIS Urban.

Deploy with confidence

One-on-one support from Esri’s subject matter experts that will ensure you maximize your investment in ArcGIS Urban.

1. 3D Launch Kit
Working with your data in your environment, Esri will help you build capacity through hands-on learning for creating, managing and sharing 2D and 3D context data for ArcGIS Urban.
2. ArcGIS Urban Launch Kit
With Esri’s support, quickly modernize your planning workflows by deploying ArcGIS Urban, allowing you to conduct meaningful planning tasks while also positioning you to expand your data and enable more advanced business workflows in the future.
3. Advanced Workflows
Let Esri’s experts help you take your planning workflows to the next level by maximizing the capabilities of Esri’s platform and implementing the latest technical innovations.

Our planners' eyes got really wide when they realized that they could quickly and easily change values in the zoning code and see what the difference in the development would be.

Ken Schmidt
GIS Administrator, City and County of Honolulu

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