Import Building data with use-of-floor and color-code each floor in ArcGIS Urban

Question

I have a building polygon data (shapefile) with use-of-floor attributes.
How could I import it into Urban and how could I color-code each floor according to its use-of-floor?

Data image:

MaximeDemers · Answer

@Till_Schmid thank you very much for your suggestions. It helps a lot!

tschmid · Answer

Hi @MaximeDemers

Thanks for your question. Out-of-the box, ArcGIS Urban doesn't support importing existing buildings with space-use information yet. I suggest to add this feature request as an idea to the Urban Ideas page, since it is a very interesting use case.

With more advanced methods, I can think of the following options to achieve your goal:

* Generate buildings from building footprints, as suggested by @JasonKarian2. 
This can be a bit tedious if the space use mix differs a lot between buildings. See our documentation to learn more about this option.
* Import the floors using the Urban API.
The operation to add spaces (floors) to a plan scenario is called mutation.createSpaces. You need at least the geometry (polygon), space use type, and height of each floor. You also need additional information, such as the ID of the parcel the space is belonging to and the floor number of the space. Depending on your data, this might need some preparation work, but it seems like this is definitely feasible. See the ArcGIS Urban API documentation to learn more or try it yourself in the Urban API GraphQL Playground.

The approach via CityEngine might be tedious, since CityEngines Urban integration doesn't support writing spaces/floors to Urban that haven't been generated with the so-called "Urban rule". This means, that you would still have to create a building type for each space-use mix, and apply this to each parcel (which would be the building footprint, in your case).

Depending on your data, you could consider using CityEngine as a data preparation tool. In this case, you can create a custom rule that creates floorplate polygons form your data. In the next step, you would still have to send these floorplates to Urban via the Urban API as described in option 2 above.

I didn't think this through in detail yet, but the way I see it, option 2 should work to achieve your goal. I hope that this information helps to get you started! Please let me know in case you have questions.

MaximeDemers · Answer

Hi,

I am interested in doing something similar. We have the buildings footprints and the information about the building height, number of floors and the spaces types (housing, commercial, industry, office, other, etc...)  for each floors. We would like to integrate this data into plans in order to model the actual state of the city and be able to play with different scenarios for futur development and see the impact on metrics.

I am not sure what is the best workflow to integrate this data in batch ideally in an automatic way. We have CityEngine and we are able to use the Urban API also.

Is it possible to generate 3D buildings with floors automatically in batch using the footprints? Can this be done with CityEngine rules and then exported in plans into Urbans?

Do we have to create building types for each building as the mix of space uses can vary a lot between buildings? Is it possible to generate the building types automatically via the API?

Any suggestions?

Thank you!

I am looking for a workflow that will generate something like this automatically from our data