Release notes for Urban October 2021

The following updates have been made to ArcGIS Urban.

General

General enhancements available for plans and projects are described below.

  • A new badge in the list of plans and projects in the overview helps signed-in users to distinguish designs from public content.
  • You can save plans and projects to other urban models.
  • Several improvements were made to the discussion functionality available in the editing experience for plans and projects:
    • You can edit the location pin of comments and replies.
    • When you copy comments and replies from one group to another, the information about the original author, the time of creation, and the original group is preserved. You can also see who copied the comments.
  • You can publish context layers to the overview when publishing plans or projects. Context layers published to the overview are visible when the detail card of the corresponding plan or project is open. Context layers are only visible in the overview if they were visible by default in the originating web scene.

Plan editing

The following new features and improvements were added to the plan editing experience:

  • Explore the building and surface space statistics per scenario in the plan configuration on the new Spaces page accessible from the Layers tab drop-down menu in the plan configuration.
  • Create custom buildings by importing footprints to a scenario and assigning a building type to them. This functionality is available from the new Spaces page in the plan configuration.
  • Several improvements were made to the suitability tool:
    • The suitability score of a parcel is displayed when hovering over the parcel in the map.
    • There is a new button that allows resetting the suitability score of all parcels.
    • The selection slider is improved and complemented with a new text box for a simpler selection of parcels based on their suitability score.
    • Criteria intervals with the same start and end value are invalidated.
    • The color ramp used to color parcels according to their suitability score is improved.
  • The subtract path tool allows you to divide parcels, zoning-, land-use-, and overlay-polygons using a defined path width. A potential use case is splitting a parcel that is crossed by a street.
  • The space-use legend of the Develop side panel is improved and now shows the total area as well as the net area.
  • The order and naming of the text boxes on the General tab of the space-use type dialog box are adjusted for a better UX.

Metrics and dashboard

This release introduces the following improvements for metrics and the metrics dashboard:

  • Use the interactive dependency graph to edit metrics and their connections with each other.
  • Configure per metric if the values should be rounded to whole numbers.
  • The functionality for importing existing metric values is moved from the Metrics tab to the Layers tab in the data manager and the plan configuration.
  • Several improvements were made to the metrics dashboard:
    • The general readability and interpretability of the different chart types is improved. The charts are displayed in white with black outlines and different shades of light gray instead of blue.
    • Select a metric in the dashboard to explore and visualize how the building spaces contribute to that metric in several ways.
    • Optionally, configure a label on source metrics. This label is used to overwrite metric names in dashboard charts with more meaningful names.
    • The sticky side panel header improves the UX for editing the dashboard and to download metric values.

Breaking changes

  • With the improvements to the suitability tool, the suitability score is now stored as a value between 0 and 10 (previously a value between 0 and 1).
  • Recalculate existing suitability scores to ensure the suitability of the parcels is visually represented correctly.

Deprecation

The following is deprecated:

  • Migrating data from the Urban data model shipped with the October 2020 release to the Urban data model shipped with the July 2021 release is no longer supported. Upgrading the database schema is still supported and occurs automatically.

Enhancements and bug fixes

The following enhancements and bug fixes were made:

  • Zoning envelopes of public plans can now also be displayed in the overview.
  • When you publish a project to public content, you can preselect the status of the public project on the publish dialog box.
  • A new button in the data manager and the design plan configuration allows deleting many space-use types at a time.
  • The UX for selecting the source units when importing data into Urban is improved.
  • The number text boxes support different decimal separators depending on the user settings.
  • The casing of the English user interface is changed from title case to sentence case.
  • Bug fix: Various bugs compromising the performance when working with large plans in the plan editor are fixed.
  • Bug fix: A performance issue when using Urban in a browser window that exceeds the resolution of 1920x1080 pixels is fixed.
  • Bug fix: The net area factor configured on an individual building space is taken into account when calculating the metrics.
  • Bug fix: The height of adjacent building spaces on the same floor is adjusted to the same height when the height of one building space on that floor is changed.
  • Bug fix: The building height is reported correctly in the plan editor side panel when there are multiple buildings on a parcel.
  • Bug fix: There were cases where the metric values from spaces were not correctly exported when exporting to a web scene. This is fixed for this release.
  • Bug fix: When exporting context layers to a web scene, the exported web scene layer order respects the order of the context layers.
  • Bug fix: Unit type strings for metrics are translated.

Known limitations

The following is a known limitation for this release:

  • In some cases, point scene layers persist in the map view when they are being used as a custom indicator layer or as a design context layer. As a workaround, publish the data as a hosted feature layer.