We’re more than overdue for a showcase, so let’s visit Sweden’s west coast and see how the city of Gothenburg is using OpenCities Planner Dialogue.

Get Back… to Making Showcases

Gothenburg is Sweden’s second largest city and one of OpenCities Planner’s most prolific and successful customers.

The city aims to transform Backaplan from a commercial area to an attractive urban quarter, helping tie both sides of the river together.

OpenCities Planner has been used to visualise the development ideas and during the recent consultation phase, which closes today (October 16th), harvest feedback from citizens.

Learn more about this ambitious plan on the city’s website:

• goteborg.se (link in Swedish)

Or check out the live project:

• OpenCities Planner

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Would you like to see your project featured on our blog? Get in touch and show us what you got!

 

The Spotlight Shines on Oceanhamnen

This month we are heading to Helsingborg, on the west coast of Sweden. The project Oceanhamnen will be a new neighbourhood situated on islands not far from the city centre. The new area will complement the city with attractive housing, offices, restaurants, and shops in a spectacular location on the waterfront.

This OpenCities Planner project is an incredible example of visualising complex 3D-models with a high level of details and realistic textures.

The main purpose of this visualisation is to sell the project to investors as well as the public. The customer used the Offline version of OpenCities Planner at residential and commercial fairs, offering a extraordinary glimpse into Helsingborg’s future.

3D Model by the Sea

The project is part of H+, a major urban planning project in Helsingborg.

The buildings contains floor plans which could be used for interior/furnishing presentations, potentially presented via On Click functionality, where all floors above the current one disappear to reveal a detailed interior.

The future looks bright in Helsingborg.

More Information

• https://hplus.helsingborg.se/etapper/oceanhamnen/
• https://hplus.helsingborg.se/

Showcase Showdown

Want to be featured in a future OpenCities Planner Showcase? Drop us a line and let us know about your success story.

This month we travel to Skärholmen, just south of Stockholm.

With an ambition to build 6,300 new homes in an area of about 5 square kilometers, this project requires well functioning communication and excellent visualisation. Using OpenCities Planner best provides citizens, urban planners, and other stakeholders both an overview of the project as well as opening up communications between parties.

When the project was in public hearing phase they used OpenCities Planner’s Dialogue feature to gather feedback. The result was that half of the comments/opinions were made through OpenCities Planner.

Hotspots

The City of Stockholm is using hotspots in the 3d-map to guide the visitors to different locations. Each hotspot, or Point of Interest in OpenCities Planner vernacular, contains further information about the highlighted project or area. It can be used for adding pictures, movies, link, and more.

Links

• Visit the published project on cityplanneronline.com
• Learn more about at the project “Focus Skärholmen” at City of Stockholm (page in Swedish)

This month’s showcase is a “Ministry of Local Government and Modernisation (KMD) project in 3D” – the cities of Stavanger and Sandnes in Norway are using OpenCities Planner to visualise & communicate.

Check out this video we made for our partner Norkart to publicise the project (captions in Norwegian):

OpenCities Planner is very flexible and user-focused. Creative users are constantly unlocking its power with their creativity.

For this month’s showcase we will travel to Linköping, a city of over 100,000 inhabitants – Sweden’s seventh largest – and shine a spotlight on their clever use of the Project Info Panel to link dialogue projects.

Organisation is the Foundation

Rather than overcomplicate a single OpenCities Planner project with too much information, Linköping created separate projects and linked them using Project Info, as a Panel, with embedded content. The embedded website contains a header, with large attractive button links to the related projects.

The projects share the same style and configuration, creating a seemless integration and excellent user experience.

Furthermore, the sub-projects have dialogue forms. This inventive solution allows the municipality to create several specific forms within the same overarching structure – thereby cultivating the best community feedback.

Check it out yourself

Here’s a link to the project:

• Mjärdevi och Västra Valla

All of the content is in Swedish only, but if you want to explore the project simply use the large buttons in the Project Info Panel to navigate between sub-projects.

It may inspire you.

SGU, the Geological Survey of Sweden, used OpenCities Planner along with 3D terrain from Lantmäteriet to create a 3D geological visualisation of the Falun Mine and Uppsala Esker Ridge.

Anatomy of the Project

This project uses several advanced features. Let’s walk through its anatomy.

• Embedded Project Info Panel – Project Info was configured as a panel with an embedded website. An embedded website is ideal for displaying advanced web content.
• Target Links – The links in the embedded Project Info panel were configured to control OpenCities Planner. Presenting content in this fashion gives the administrator an alternative way of presenting their project — with more granular control.
• Transparency – When visualising underground content, transparency is critical. The Transparency slider is used to view content such as the underground mine.
• WMS Layers – Information from SGU’s internal Web Map Service was added to the project in order to integrate geo-referenced data.
• 3D Models – This project is packed with 3D models of various sizes and styles, explore and see what you can find.
• Points of Interest – Offer contextual information for specified areas, as always.

Links

• Check out the project, hosted on SGU’s website (in Swedish)
• Read more about the project: Falu gruva och Uppsalaåsen i 3D (in Swedish)
• If you are curious and cannot read Swedish, you can still learn a little about Falun Mine and Uppsala Esker Ridge on Wikipedia in English.

With rain in the forecast for Roskilde Festival, one of Europe’s largest music events, Niras used OpenCities Planner to create a “3D Mud Map” to help festival-goers set up their tent in a dry place.

Setting Up the Project

To create the Mud Map, several core OpenCities Planner features were used. Let us explore…

• 3D Models  – The tents, stages, trees, and festival infrastructure were all added as simple 3D models
• WMS Layer – For putting the mud into the Mud Map, a WMS service was configured to indicate flooding areas in blue
• WMS Layer – You might think the 2D map of the festival was an XL Terrain Image draped over the 3D terrain, but this was also set up using WMS
• Points of Interest (label only) –  Used for indicating the various venues and tent areas

Success Story

The Roskilde Mud Map was a huge success, generating over 8,200 page views before and during the festival which ran from June 30th to the 7th of July.

The average visitor was using OpenCities Planner for nearly 3 minutes. Not only did thousands of users visit, but they were very engaged (and presumably dry).

Links

• Visit the published project on cityplanneronline.com
• Learn more about Roskilde Festival
• Niras is Agency9’s partner in Denmark. If you’d like to read more about the project in Danish, please visit their website.

Malmö is Sweden’s third largest city and Amiralstaden is Malmö’s most important city planning process.

The centre of this process is the forthcoming Rosengård Station. The 3D Team at the Department of Urban Planning created a OpenCities Planner dialogue project, as a part of the planning process.

Want to learn more? You can visit the published project directly or read about it on malmo.se (all links in Swedish).

Here’s a good example how to visualise a time line for planned buildings in a city wide model.

The city of Gothenburg uses OpenCities Planner to present all major city development plans in a photorealistic city mesh model.

Most of the 3D-models were created in CityEngine, exported as Collada, and imported into OpenCities Planner. Colours are used to present building phases throughout the city. Red indicates projects to be built before 2021, Orange before 2028, and Yellow before 2035.

Not only is this a simple solution but it is also effective.

A user can quickly get an understanding of how and when the city will develop. The same principle can be applied with content using different icons to represent time, or by using layers to group content into particular time periods.