GIS in Urban Planning - Higher Education Webinar - Q&A

[BrianBaldwin]

In early 2021, we held a webinar that discussed how Esri is working to support Geodesign, as well as Urban & Regional Planning programs, students, and faculty. There was a lot of great discussion and a ton of questions that we weren't able to get to in the webinar. As part of our follow-up, we wanted to ensure that we pushed out answers to these great questions.

If you would like to see the original webinar, please visit the landing page here: GIS in Urban Planning - Higher Education webinar.

Answers provided by: Brian Baldwin, Professor Ryu, and James Sipes

It would be helpful to have a 'shared area' with numerous town & city examples from cities and also from students.

Please visit this site, which will be constantly updated with links to examples, case studies, resources, etc.: https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/569269c624f348d6a1f42c141629dbb2/

Is there a way for educators, cities, and neighborhoods to collaborate across the country?

There are certainly no technological roadblocks preventing various parties from working together. ArcGIS Urban as well as ArcGIS Hub provide frameworks for engaging stakeholders and allow for 2-way communication. There are a few examples of schools working jointly on studios and if anyone has interest in building out a joint project, please reach out and we can help connect/facilitate discussions.

What is the interface for building specific urban parameters in ArcGIS Urban? Is it more friendly than CityEngine?

ArcGIS Urban is fully web-based and the configuration of parameters can occur in an easy to use UI. The basic inputs that are required for ArcGIS Urban is a defined zoning code. Esri provides a pre-configured sample that users can use out of the box, or they can configure their own.

Can ArcGIS Urban measure wind and shadow patterns?

ArcGIS Urban can model shadow patterns, but there is no functionality for wind modelling in Urban. Users have the ability to run richer analysis in ArcGIS Pro (traffic studies, wind, solar radiation) and then include these layers in ArcGIS Urban.

Do students need to already be familiar with ArcGIS prior to using tools like ArcGIS Urban and GeoPlanner?

If students will be required to do data preparation, then some prior ArcGIS experience would be helpful. For students that will be exploring scenarios, running simple analysis, or modifying parameters, no prior GIS experience is necessary.

I find that students do not "need" to be familiar with ArcGIS Pro to use ArcGIS Urban. Actually, I find ArcGIS Urban a good gateway to introduce them to the more powerful ArcGIS Pro program since knowing the latter does help in maximizing their utility of ArcGIS Urban with its ability to create layers. However, for my particular class, ArcGIS Urban was more approachable and less intimidating for students. This is what I noticed since we did ArcGIS Pro assignments the previous time I taught the course and most noted that ArcGIS Pro was not necessarily intuitive for them to navigate. Now having said this, I want to disclose that my students are MPA students with little or no exposure to GIS before my class. Also, the course is primarily a planning course focused on introducing various planning frameworks and producing decision-aiding reports. Thus, ArcGIS Urban was introduced as a medium for the learning objective and not its primary objective. That is, making good plans was the priority where ArcGIS Urban was introduced as a modern tool that better enables us to do so. Students did later take subsequent Geosciences courses to acquire in-depth instruction on ArcGIS Pro.

Yes, they should have at least familiarity with ArcGIS.

Is help for faculty limited to the United States? Is there assistance for faculty/programs internationally?

Please just reach out directly to Brian (direct message through the Esri Community) and he can get you in touch with your local Esri office for support. We would love to see success at programs across the world, not just in the US.

Does ArcGIS Urban simulate impacts of different scenarios?

Yes.  The hypothetical changes in sustainability indicators and infrastructure requirements for different scenarios were helpful in illustrating the impacts to the city.  This was relevant for my course in illustrating how different scenarios impact capital investment plans of the local government.  Encouraging certain structures with atypical infrastructure requirements will put strain on the city's infrastructure capacity.  Thus, corresponding adjustments must be made on the capital budget request side.  For our class, the ArcGIS Urban feature helped illustrate this point.

Urban provides measurable outputs, making it easy to compare one scenario to another. Dashboards are very helpful for this.

Is it difficult to get the required data for potential project sites?

Yes, this was the biggest challenge for us.  Our city did not have a consolidated project site dataset for us to import into ArcGIS Urban.  Thus, for us, the project site data was compiled by our university with the GIS Center doing most of the heavy lifting.

How can planning programs improve upon student understanding of infrastructure planning and prepare them to be better collaborators with public works?

For our locality, infrastructure capacity was more of the focus rather than infrastructure vulnerability.  ArcGIS Urban is good for the former since the program is forward looking.  As for infrastructure vulnerability, I am thinking ArcGIS Pro would be better suited for such analysis since they would be stress tests on existing infrastructure.

How can online tools like ArcGIS Urban help translate to working more closely with citizens?

Opening up scenarios for citizen input would be a way.  However, this would require better coordination with the city's Planning and Zoning Commission since not all city development applications are open for public hearings.  Local ordinances will dictate which applications are subject to public hearing and which are not (although all application decisions are open for public observation).  

The one they they really help with is allowing citizens to see information in 3D rather than just maps, and Dashboards help communicate results. I still question whether Urban is a good tool to allow citizens to touch at this point ... better to have a seasoned planner using the tool interactively at a work sessions.

Can this modeling be used to determine how a project interacts on both a municipal and regional scale?

Sure, just a question of collecting appropriate data. We used the Utica city limits because that was our focus, and much of the data was already clipped to the city limit, but we could have done the same thing for the county. It is more of the time needed to collect data, whether the data is available (for example, I am guessing that parcel data was not available for the entire county), and the time it takes to set things up.

What do you think about putting these tools into the hands of community constituents, for exploring and designing themselves? (Would this be possible with pre-baked scenarios or with GeoPlanner?)

This is a possibility.  However, I would push back on this approach.  This is because the scenarios are less effective as undisciplined sketches.  They are best introduced as investment aid tools that embodies best practices.  The program themselves would require training and a program license to the public.

My institution has used ArcGIS Desktop for GIS teaching and have been making shifts to ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Pro recently. What is your experience in teaching regarding this shift?

We have found the basics are the same, but there is a pretty significant change in menu structure, terminology, commands, available tools, useability, etc. We would suggest make the shift, not going back and forth between the two, because the lack of knowledge about menu structure (i.e. where to find a command, and how it is different than Desktop) is a limitation and we went them to learn to do this in Pro.