Vancouver the third Autodesk Digital City
Published 7:30 pm, Wed 18 Mar 2009
The urban hub of Canada’s West coast has been signed up to become the latest city to visualise a 3D model for the future to aid sustainability and prepare for future development.
The concept of the Digital City provides a way for the public, city government, construction and business communities to combine mapping, building, civil engineering, and utility information into an accurate city model that can be used to simulate the future impact of decisions at a city-wide scale.
Vancouver follows on from Salzburg, Austria and Incheon, Korea who are already part of the scheme. Jay Bhatt, senior vice president AEC solutions, Autodesk, says that it is well positioned to help cities meet the challenges of visualising and simulating their future growth. He said: “While Salzburg plans to use Digital Cities technology for helping manage an aged and prized infrastructure and the city of Incheon will focus on how to build—from the ground up—a city of the future, the City of Vancouver will use Autodesk technology to extend its leadership role as one of the most livable and progressive cities in the world.”
The goal of this pilot program is for Vancouver to be able to bring together 3D models of above and below ground features in an open platform that supports secure and robust integration of CAD, building information modelling, geospatial, civil engineering, and infrastructure data over a wide geographic area. By combining the data with realistic visualisation, analysis and simulation tools, the City of Vancouver can deliver an intuitive and compelling way to understand the impact of plans and proposals from any point in time and from any point of view.
“Urban design at a city-wide scale is the next great design challenge,” continues Jay. “Our Digital City technology provides cities like Vancouver with a comprehensive approach to create a sustainable city that balances economic and engineering demands with environmental and social needs.”
