The following updates have been made to ArcGIS Urban.
General
The following new features and general improvements are available in Urban:
- There is an improved user experience when you create an urban model:
- When you import parcels and zoning, see information about the original data source’s coordinate system.
- When you import data from a feature layer in a coordinate system other than Web Mercator, a new dialog box informs you that the data will be reprojected to Web Mercator on import.
- The accessibility of Urban is further improved. You can use keyboard navigation and screen reader capabilities on additional user interface elements. In addition, color contrast is improved in several parts of the app.
- Access the Urban documentation, the latest release notes, and What’s new blog post articles from the Menu.
- New Learn more links in the data manager and the plan editor take you to dedicated documentation pages with additional information on how to use Urban.
- A new and more performant approach to copying plans and projects.
- Use the Who can save as duplicate setting on the Sharing tab in the plan and project configuration to control whether other users can create copies of your plans and projects. This setting is only available to the owner and is turned off by default.
- Use the Who can export and save as duplicate setting on the Sharing tab in the data manager to control whether other users can create copies of projects stored in the Urban database and can export the Urban database to a file geodatabase. This setting is only available to the owner and is turned off by default.
Overview
The following new features and general improvements are available in the overview:
- The camera of the map view no longer adjusts depending on the search bar input.
- The performance for loading plans and projects in the overview is improved.
Data manager and plan configuration
The following new features and improvements are available in the data manager and the plan configuration:
- When you import data from a feature layer in a coordinate system other than Web Mercator, a new dialog box informs you that the data will be reprojected to Web Mercator on import.
- The Join ID field is renamed as Custom ID on all field-matching dialog boxes. A new info icon clarifies whether the Custom ID value is used to join other datasets that are part of the urban data model or whether the ID can be used as an additional reference to the original data.
- If no space-use types exist in your urban model or plan, the Allowed space use types field is disabled in the zoning types import field matcher dialog box.
- When you import zoning, land-use, and overlay types from a feature table, the features' order in the original dataset is carried over to the Urban database. This capability was already made available in an earlier release for importing types from spreadsheets.
- The user interface is more reactive upon consecutive drag-and-drop order changes of zoning, land-use, and overlay types.
- In the plan configuration, the Delete all dialog box explicitly shows from which scenario the data will be deleted.
- A warning icon on the Appearance tab of the zoning types, land-use types, and overlay types dialog boxes notifies you if there is invalid content.
Plan editing
The following new features and improvements were added to the plan editing experience:
- The user experience for envelopes is improved:
- Experience an improved envelope visualization. Parcels in which the maximum building height is not restricted show an open envelope with dashed lines at each corner. Setbacks no longer split up envelopes into individual geometries. Envelope edges are shown with white instead of black edges.
- You do not have to enable envelopes per parcel anymore. Instead, envelopes can be directly turned on or off in the Menu. You can either show all envelopes or only the envelopes on parcels with planned developments (planned buildings, planned surfaces, or parcels that are fully demolished).
- The envelopes generate faster. You can continue to edit your plan while envelopes are being generated.
- For plan scenario web scenes, Urban still uses the previous envelope algorithm.
- The suitability tool is improved:
- All suitability model changes are now saved automatically in the background.
- The color ramp that displays the suitability scores is improved.
- The display of the suitability score calculation results in large plans is improved.
- The web scene export functionality is improved:
- Use the 360 VR Experience option to create a VR experience based on your web scene.
- The pop-up window for projects within the study area looks the same as the project pop-up window in the city web scene.
- The parcels pop-up displays None instead of an empty box in the Regulation section if a parcel has no zoning regulation.
- Zones and overlays with the same Name or Label are handled better and displayed correctly.
- The field aliases on the feature service created for the scenario web scene include units for the suitability criteria value fields.
- The feature service created for the scenario web scene uses generic metric and suitability model field names to comply with current field name length restrictions on ArcGIS Online.
- Any user who has editing privileges can edit the Existing scenario.
- You can now delete building types initially used to develop a parcel. When doing so, the Planned development on selected parcels field in the Development side panel will show Unknown building type instead of the building type's name.
- The Zoning layers item in the Menu is now called Zoning.
- The Zoning envelopes item in the Menu is now called Envelopes.
- The undo and redo capability is improved.
Project editing
The following new features and improvements were added to the project editing experience:
- Explore the new scenario to web scene creation experience. See Work with scenario web scenes for details.
- Projects now use the metrics from the urban model. You can no longer configure metrics in the project settings. Instead, use the data manager. Metrics you configure in the data manager are available for all projects associated with an urban model. See Configure the dashboard to learn more.
Note:
Urban migrates the existing project metric values the first time a user with editing privileges opens a project after the June 2023 release. In this migration, Urban tries to match the project metric values to a corresponding metric in the urban model based on the metric's name and unit type. Urban shows a warning message if no matching metric exists in the urban model. The warning message includes the metric values that could not be carried over. Note down these values and add them manually
Removed functionality
The following functionality is removed from the app with this release:
- The user interface to create an embed link for an urban model, a plan, or project is removed from the sharing page in the data manager and plan and project configuration. To embed urban content, use city web scenes, plan scenario web scenes, and project scenario web scenes. See Work with city web scenes, Work with plan scenario web scenes, and Work with project scenario web scenes for details. Previous embed links continue to be supported for the time being.
- This release removes the legacy workflow to export a plan scenario to a web scene. Use the Create scenario web scene workflow instead. See Work with scenario web scenes for details.
- The ability to enable envelopes per parcel was replaced with the new envelope user experience. Use the Planned development toggle to only show envelopes on parcels with planned developments (planned buildings, planned surfaces, or parcels that are fully demolished). You can hide envelopes by setting the maximum allowed height to 0 in zone types, on overlays, or parcel overrides. For presentation and storytelling, you can edit zoning envelopes in the exported web scene.
Enhancements and bug fixes
The following enhancements and bug fixes are introduced with this release:
- Support for Austrian German is added.
- Parcels are rendered with a white outline when in Realistic visualization mode.
- The measure distance and measure area tools now support snapping.
- If your browser runs into an issue with displaying the Urban 3D content, you now see a dedicated error page with suggestions for resolving the issue.
- The create web scene dialog box hides unnecessary steps. For example, it hides the Plans step if no plans can be added to the web scene.
- You can now cancel the web scene creation process.
- This release refines the capability to lock plan and project scenarios. See Work with plan scenarios and Work with project scenarios to learn more.
- All design context layers are now referred to as context layers.
- The scenario design visualization in projects is now referred to as scenario visualization.
- Bug fix—Sharing an urban model, plans, and projects with ArcGIS Online groups where the Shared update setting was enabled was impossible. This is fixed.
- Bug fix—Existing metric values were not imported correctly when the US Standard option was selected from the Units in source drop-down menu on the import dialog box. This is fixed.
- Bug fix—An issue in which the default project status icon was not displayed in the data manager projects table is fixed.
- Bug fix—The dwelling units density values needed to be in different units when importing zoning types compared to when importing overlay types. This is harmonized with this release.
- Bug fix—The analysis tools did not close when returning to the overview from a plan or project. This is fixed.
- Bug fix—An issue in which the extent of newly created plan and project design feature services was not set correctly is fixed. Only plan and project design feature services created since the February 2023 release were affected by this issue.
- Bug fix—The layer list in the Menu only showed context layers if they were added through a web scene. The layer list now also shows context layers that were directly added to Urban.
- Bug fix—The warning labels are now removed after resetting the building type on a parcel in the plan editor.
- Bug fix—An issue in the plan editor in which the browser's undo capability conflicted with the Urban undo capability is fixed.
- Bug fix—This release fixes display issues with different chart types in the plan editor's Dashboard side panel.
- Bug fix—When downloading the metric values to a spreadsheet, the existing metric values were not rounded correctly if no parcels were selected. This is fixed.
- Bug fix—The plan scenario web scene creation failed when a scenario web scene was already created from a plan with the same name. This is fixed.
- Bug fix—The shadows in the plan scenario web scene were not displayed when switching between slides. This is fixed.
- Bug fix—When sharing a plan scenario web scene, the sharing settings on the web scene item were not transferred to the associated hosted feature layer item.
Known limitations
The following are known limitations of this release:
- When you validate zoning using a land-use plan scenario, the user interface might not list all land-use plans that intersect the zoning plan study area. This happens if the zoning or land-use plans were created since the February 2023 release. As a workaround, define the content extent of the corresponding hosted feature layer on ArcGIS Online and try again. See Define content extent for details.
- You cannot import features from an ArcGIS Online feature layer item that points to an ArcGIS Enterprise hosted feature layer.
- Envelopes on irregular terrain might show visual artifacts.
- When you create a city web scene, a plan scenario, or a project scenario web scene, markdown description URLs that include any of the following characters are not supported:
- Blank characters
- =
- #
- [
- ]
- @
- !
- $