163: A Digital Pencil to Maximize Real Estate in Urban Places

Paul Waddell, Professor of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkley and Founder & President of UrbanSim, and Matt McMullen, Associate Principal at Abel Design Group join us on this episode 163 of Art of Construction. In our last episode, Devon spoke to Hypar about their plan to jumpstart the AEC industry with a tool that rapidly generates alternating building options using preexisting information and expertise from the built world. From that conversation Art of Construction was lead to Paul Waddell, who is doing something similar for the real estate market and urban development.  Paul’s platform UrbanSim is an open source model system used by Metropolitan Planning Organizations and others for operational planning purposes in a variety of U.S. metropolitan areas and internationally. Urban Canvas is a visual platform within UrbanSim that allows you to rapidly visualize various development scenarios and see their effects using up to date analytics and data from the cloud. Essentially, it is the Hypar for urban planning and development. Last but not least in the toolkit is Penciler, a powerful new web-based tool for multifamily housing development that lets you create and compare many different building options for a site, helping you to make better-informed site acquisition decisions.  Together, what all this amounts to is a set of tools that cut through a ridiculously large amount of data to help make development decisions effectively and immediately. These decisions can range from where you should put a single multifamily unit in a certain area of San Francisco, to major city and state policy decisions made by governmental bodies. In an age where progress stalls because no one can agree on what the solid facts are, UrbanSim allows people the opportunity to put their differences aside and make real decisions using trusted data they can visualize immediately.  Talk about a huge impact.  Join Devon and Matt as they go on a journey with Paul to learn all about his amazing platform UrbanSim, the real estate market of the future, and how the ability to rapidly evaluate development opportunities will push urban planning to new heights and lead to better communities for us all!