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Urban Analytics Tab

The Urban Analytics tab is a hard-coded report of basic project metrics

Holly Conrad Smith avatar
Written by Holly Conrad Smith
Updated over 2 months ago

Get powerful insights about your project’s performance, at a glance.

The Urban Tab shows a quick analysis of the geometry on the map, The Urban Tab gives a quick report of standard real estate metrics, like GBA, FAR/FSR, and Unit Counts. It calculates using inputs from Usages and Properties, multiplied by geometric properties like length and area.

The values in the Urban Tab update dynamically as you draw.

Access the Urban Tab

The Urban Tab is Accessed from the right-hand palette. The icon looks like a house and a skyscraper.

The urban tab is always included at project startup. Click the icon to review it.

User Interface Overview

1. Switch whether building areas are grouped by Usage, Building, or Group

2. Select which areas to view - Gross Building, Gross Floor, or Net Rentable/Saleable

3. Display of areas, grouped as selected in step 1

4. Breakdown of Site coverage, and FAR/FSR

5. Urban metrics like height, facade area, and basement area.

6. Parking metrics

7. Breakdown of residential units, if applicable

8. Breakdown of density metrics, if applicable

What features are used for calculations:

  • Urban only counts what is visible. If Features are on an invisible drawing layer, they will not be counted in Urban.

  • If the feature was created by or assigned to a 3rd party app, it will be ignored.

    • IE - GLTF imports or dxf imports will be ignored until converted into Giraffe geometry with a usage applied.

  • Urban is intended to report on Building massing. Land Use and generic usages are generally excluded.

    • To report on other usages, create a custom report in Analytics.

Building Area Bar-chart

The areas of all the buildings (whose layers are visible) in the project are aggregated in a bar-chart. By default, values are grouped by usage.

Click on GBA, GFA or NSA to see these values in the chart. Change what groups are shown in the chart using the dropdown on the top right.

Site Area Breakdown

The FSR/FAR is calculated by dividing the total building area by the site area.

The FSR/FAR updates based on your selection of GBA, GFA, or NSA areas in the section above.

The site area (the area within the project boundary) is broken down into:

Building Footprint

This includes any area underneath stacked building sections, including overhangs.

This includes buildings from outside the project/site boundary!

Site Hardscape

This includes any part of the site covered by road/footpath, on-grade parking, plaza or other pavement features.

Paved areas:

Roads and paths areas:

Open Space

This includes any landscape or space within the project boundary that has not been covered by any features.

Clipping

Giraffe attempts to recognize when features overlap. When you draw a building on top of a landscape (for instance), the Giraffe calculation engine attempts to remove the landscape area under the building footprint from the landscape coverage calculations.

Clipping Processes:

  • Landscape

    • Landscape overlapped by roads, paving, or buildings do not count toward open space or landscape

  • Paving

    • Paving and roads overlapped by buildings do not count toward hardscape

  • Parking

    • If an on-grade parking lot is covered by landscape, plaza, road or buildings, it will reduce it's number of parking bays provided in proportion to how much it is covered.

  • Overlapping geometries of the same type

    • If two or more landscape geometries overlap, the duplicated space is only counted once

    • If two paving geometries overlap, the duplicated space is only counted once

  • Outside the site area

    • The calculations do not clip to the site boundary. Be sure to include all geometries within the site boundary for correct calculations.

💡 Typically, Giraffe is smart enough to calculate when features overlap. However, projects with a lot of geometry can overload processing, so you may see this message:

If you see this message, you may want to create your own coverage percentages and FAR/FSR reports using Analytics.

Urban Metrics

The urban metrics are rolled-up calculations for all building geometries in the report.

  • The maximum height is the tallest building in the project.

  • The facade area is the sum of each section's facade area.

  • The Floor:Facade ratio is the ratio of the total gross area (GBA) to the total facade area.

  • The basement area is the total gross area (GBA) of all basement features.

  • Paved area is the total paved area - roads, footpaths, on-grade parking and plaza. Hovering the mouse pointer over this number reveals the breakdown of paved area between these types.

  • Landscape is the total landscape area that has not been covered by hardscape

Parking Metrics

Provides a quick comparison of Parking Provided / Parking Required for the whole project. Green means there is adequate parking. Red means more parking is needed.

Hovering the mouse pointer over this reveals a breakdown by parking type and usage.

How Parking is Calculated

  • Parking Provided is the gross area (GBA) of all parking features multiplied by parkingProvided per 100m²/1000f²

  • If a parking feature has generated parking bays, these will be counted, multiplied by the number of levels and used as the feature's parking provided value.

  • Parking is calculated for each feature, and them summed across the project

How Parking Required is Calculated

  • Parking Required is the net area (GFA) of all building features multiplied by parkingRequired per 100m²/1000f².

  • Residential buildings calculate the number of parking bays required per dwelling, which is configured in the usage editor (plus a total for visitor parking) instead of calculating by area.

  • The visitorParkingBays adds additional required parking per feature

Residential Metrics

Displays a report of dwellings based on calculated areas or dwelling counts.

How Dwellings are calculated

  • The number of dwellings for building features is calculated by splitting the net area (GFA) of the building feature into dwellings according to the mix and size specified in the dwellings property of the Usage.

  • The number of dwellings from dwelling features is calculated b the dwellingCount property. If dwellingCountPerLevel is toggled on, the count is dwellingCount*levels

Density Metrics

Gives a few density metrics based on occupancy.

  • The number of residents is calculated by summing each dwelling by the number of residents per dwelling. This is also specified in the dwellings property of the Usage editor.

  • The Space/person is the total landscape area of the project divided by the total number of residents.

  • The Carparks/person is the total number of parking bays provided divided by the total number of residents.

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