We will explore the implementation of the scanning process of an entire Mexico City district and the impact that this process represents as a social-decision support tool. Urban planning has a special responsibility to represent societal needs. Using laser scanning technologies with a powerful 3D visualization tool like ReCap software, planners can generate and explain new ideas, and they can get more people involved in the planning phase. Information for urban planning must integrate all possible strategic information coming from different sources. In other words, the information must be accurate and updated and it should represent a high-fidelity 3D model of the city. In addition, when data is coming from different sources, the integration and management of this information plays a vital role for decision-making and urban planning at all levels of the society. In this lecture we will review the advances that laser scanning methods offer in urban planning for a more sustainable built environment.

Come be one of the first to get a look at Autodesk’s newest urban planning offering - Urban Canvas. Gain valuable knowledge, insight and hands-on experience into this new product, and share your impressions. The design and development team will give a product overview, and Dan Campbell from the City of Vancouver will share his experience with early testing of Urban Canvas. You will have a chance to discuss workflows in the new program and compare it with your experience and expectations. This is a unique opportunity to collaborate with Autodesk experts and other urban planners and designers to help shape the future of the product.

Arkio is a new collaborative design tool that enables designers to work together on buildings, interiors and urban plans using VR, AR, PCs, tablets and phones. In this session we will demonstrate Arkio live and show how it can be used to quickly sketch various design options on top of Revit and BIM 360 models and how the resulting designs can be exported back as native Revit geometry and families. During these live demos we will show examples of how Arkio is being used by architects, urban planners and educators. We will talk about how features like designing with parametric shapes, real-time program calculations, sun studies, sections and shared views are helping our users streamline their design process.

Autodesk Research’s in-house architectural studio, The Living, is a pioneer in the application of generative-design technology. They have completed successful projects for Airbus—the famous bionic partition for the A320—and internal to Autodesk, including both the design of the new office in Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District and the exhibit hall layout for last year’s Autodesk University. In late 2016, The Living was approached by Van Wijnen, an innovative Dutch construction company interested in reinventing the way the firm built homes. Van Wijnen wanted to apply generative design at the urban scale, exploring possibilities around the layout of residential areas based on financial, sociological, or environmental metrics. Speakers from Autodesk Research will present the concept behind the project and details of the Dynamo-based tool that Van Wijnen uses for new layouts. Additionally, a speaker from Van Wijnen will talk about how the tool is used and has changed the way the firm approaches urban planning projects.

Autodesk Research’s in-house architectural studio, The Living, is a pioneer in the application of Generative Design technology. They have completed successful projects for Airbus – the famous bionic partition for the A320 – and internal to Autodesk, including both the design of the new office in the MaRS district of Toronto and the exhibit hall layout for last year’s Autodesk University. In late 2016, The Living was approached by Van Wijnen, an innovative Dutch construction company interested in reinventing the way they build homes. They wanted to apply Generative Design at the urban scale, exploring possibilities around the layout of residential areas based on financial, sociological or environmental metrics. Speakers from Autodesk Research will present the concept behind the project and details of the Dynamo-based tool that Van Wijnen uses for new layouts. A speaker from Van Wijnen will talk about how the tool is used and has changed the way they approach urban planning projects.

The future of sustainable, equitable urban design hinges on access to actionable data at the earliest design stages. This session will explore the ongoing strategic alliance between Autodesk and Esri, with an exclusive look at the new Autodesk Forma extension for ArcGIS that integrates deep geographic information system (GIS) insights directly into design workflows. You’ll hear from Lake Flato Architects’ Urban Planning Studio, the Forma team, and Esri’s Professional Services about how the Forma real-time simulation and massing tools, combined with robust GIS layers—from flood risk and green infrastructure to demographic and zoning data—can empower planning decisions that balance ecology, equity, and economy. Through real-world examples and a forward-looking road map, we’ll show how GIS-driven design accelerates collaboration and unlocks transformational outcomes for communities.

Often we see Virtual Reality being used on a small scale, hotel rooms and small bungalows, it is not often we see a large urban plan being adopted for Virtual Reality. Looking at large scale models, such as models from Planning and Urban Design, the functionality and process to bring it to life is completely different. Focusing less on the small details, such as furniture types and kitchen appliances, and more towards the functionality and interactivity to suit the larger designs. In this Class we will look at a CallisonRTKL Case Study, showcasing the implementation of bringing some of the largest urban developments in the world into Virtual Reality and creating an interactive area over 1,000m wide, and over 1,000m high. We will focus on the process and optimization of your 3D Studio Max files, and integrating them into Unreal Engine, with some simple interactivity to help navigate through large scale models, finally looking at how to simply maintain these models through the design process.

GHD has developed a master planning solution for urban planning and large-scale master planning projects using InfraWorks and Civil 3D. The new workflows allow GHD to overcome several issues and include automatically linking geometry and attribute information and easily modifying building forms and layout of masterplans (both buildings and plots); real-time testing and option development with clients; automatically creating 3D models using the predefined attribute information in InfraWorks; automating the process to help the team reduce manual errors, improve efficiency, and focus on productive tasks such as working on design options instead of spending the time on manual data processing.

Learn how InfraWorks can be used a City-wide data aggregator and planning tool, and consume different BIM models to form a single City-Wide City Information Model (CIM)

We'll discuss visualization in virtual reality (VR) using large city data sets to plan, design, and market developments. Topics will include documenting cities through photogrammetry and how to utilize real-time city models in planning and design review. Using our highly detailed 3D model of San Francisco, we'll demonstrate the power of VR technology with a series of experiences at different phases of the project lifecycle. We'll showcase use scenarios for city planning, communicating, and marketing of hotel, commercial, and condominium development. This is not a step-by-step guide to creating VR experiences. We'll walk you through the streets of rapidly developing San Francisco neighborhoods. You should expect to gain a basic understanding of unique solutions possible for common challenges that developers and architects face.

In the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, we are challenged to consider many design options, to find the fittest solution in the shortest time, and to be leaders in economic and sustainable designs. During this presentation, you’ll learn about how computational design techniques can help you improve your design process for buildings. In this class, you’ll discover how our products generate better outcomes for designs using computational and generative design techniques. You’ll get an overview of how ‘traditional" design improves with design automation, computational modeling, and generative design methods with Dynamo and Refinery. All of this will be taught using examples from the architectural, urban planning, and structural industry.

In this class, we'll learn how to work with a workflow between InfraWorks software, AutoCAD Civil 3D software, and Revit software together for master plan design. We'll start with the model builder extraction from InfraWorks of the site, then we'll look at how this file needs to be aligned with the actual topography survey on AutoCAD Civil 3D and back to InfraWorks, and how can we work with these 2 having interactions using the SDF format. Next we'll cover how to extract the topography models from InfraWorks and AutoCAD Civil 3D to Revit so any building pads and model elements can return or be used on both platforms to get quantities. We will explore 2 case examples of this workflow with a touristic walk-through of a hotel project in Huatulco, Mexico, and an urban planning project in Mexico City.

In this session, you will learn the basics of the FormIt 360 software user interface and explore the export-import functionality. We will review source file types and locations for urban planning exercises across major cities such as New York; Los Angeles; Washington, DC; and Boston. Then we’ll explore the possibilities of importing files into Revit software using FormIt 360 software’s native Revit file translation process. Finally, we will review the results and enhanced workflow functionality of urban models in linked Revit software files. This session features FormIt 360 and Revit. AIA Approved

Silos of data should be history, but integrating geographic information system (GIS) with 3D model-based design can be a real challenge. The ability to aggregate data and visualize multiple sources of information is crucial for decision making within municipal organizations. With ArcGIS Online and InfraWorks software, you have the edge: the cloud-based ability to easily aggregate personal, organizational, and public data previously locked in GIS files or servers. For urban development, environmental planning, or capital projects, this capacity can enhance the value of your GIS data to create rich 3D design models for critical infrastructure projects. In this session, we will demonstrate the use of InfraWorks software to aggregate ArcGIS Online. You will learn how to configure local GIS servers for ArcGIS Online access. We'll also show you how to configure ArcGIS orthophoto and terrain services for use in InfraWorks. Finally, we'll demonstrate the process using a specific road-design example from a large North American city.

Smart cities have become a landmark in urban planning. They are the result of knowledge-intensive and creative strategies aiming at enhancing the socio-econimic, ecological, logistic and competitive performance of citires. This session cover how disruptive technologies are being harnessed to deliver on smart cities of the future.

This panel session explores how Autodesk Forma is being used in the feasibility phase of the Big Bold Bordeaux Vision—a community-driven initiative to transform a large parcel of land located in North Nashville through a Community Land Trust. Panelists, including local leaders and AECO professionals, will share how Forma supports early-stage analysis of zoning, urban density, and Sustainable Design to inform equitable land use decisions. The session highlights how Forma enables transparent, data-driven planning that. Lastly, this session will focus on this process that facilitates the foundational communication between municipalities and community voices that supports long-term health equity goals.

Many struggle scaling the adoption and usage of Dynamo for automation within their organisation. This presentation will describe the steps and workflows that GHD went through in implementing Dynamo at an enterprise level. It will explore how to best manage Dynamo graphs, nodes, and custom source code. It will discuss the people aspect of implementing automation workflows and the different training initiatives that were developed to assist users in upskilling to visual programming. It will also explore ways to best change the mindset of engineers and modelers to adopt data-driven workflows.The presentation will also step through a 3-stage Urban Planning initiative where GHD changed a manual, disconnected, error-prone, time-consuming process to an data-driven, automated, and accurate workflow. It will explore the why, what, and the outcomes of these initiatives, and end with a look into a generative design example which GHD partnered with Autodesk's "The Living" for a large, urban planning competition.

Discover how Autodesk Forma software enabled our team to optimize a large-scale urban development project in its earliest design phases. This session will showcase how we used Forma to simulate daylight, wind, and energy impact in real-time, enabling smarter massing and faster stakeholder alignment. By integrating Forma with Revit software and using environmental analytics early, we shortened iteration cycles, improved design outcomes, and delivered a more sustainable, compliant solution. Whether you're an architect, urban planner, or Project Delivery lead, this session will offer practical workflows to transform your early design process with Forma.

As urban areas expand, the challenge is clear: evolve into sustainable and inclusive environments or risk growing disparities and instability. Many of the challenges we are trying to overcome are inherently spatial, so we must first understand their immediate surroundings in order to bring solutions to the table. Urban & Infrastructure projects should be able to collect and manage data to identify needs and prioritize them. Through the integration of BIM and GIS, we can adopt a geographic and holistic approach to overcome the challenges ahead of us by enabling the project to be visualized and assessed in that real-world context allowing professionals to enhance project understanding. In this talk, you will learn how to implement GIS (Geographic Information Systems) interoperability with BIM (Building Information Modeling) in early-stage planning to create inclusive and welcoming cities.