Aug 12 - Holistic City Releases CityCAD 1.1 for Design, Analysis

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Holistic City Releases CityCAD 1.1 for Design, Analysis

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LONDON, UK, Aug 12, 2008 - Holistic City Ltd has released the first upgrade to CityCAD, its new CIM (City Information Modeling) package. Version 1.1 is now available for download with a flexible 8-hour free trial.

New Capabilities

Since CityCAD was launched in June, Holistic City has been receiving feedback from users around the world, including master planners, developers, engineers and planning authorities.

CityCAD 1.1 was created to make it easier to work on both larger and smaller scale city models. The key points are :

New, flexible 8-hour free trial. You can download and activate CityCAD for this trial even if you have previously tried the 7-Day Free Trial.
Improved drawing interface makes it easier to work with models at a small scale.
New 'Mixed-Use Block' type makes it easy to model the layouts of large scale community planning projects or Eco Towns, where the built form is not yet defined.
Improved DXF Import capability providing assistance on positioning files within the model, and import of more than one layer at a time.

Major improvements are in the pipeline, including improved interoperability with GIS systems. Details about the next major upgrade will be released in September.

What is CityCAD?

CityCAD was the first major CIM (City Information Modeling) software application to be released for the city design, planning and development community.

It was created for analyzing concepts and layers in the early stages of a master plan, during scenario testing, feasibility studies and identifying strategic risks and opportunities.

It is a 'parametric' tool - meaning that if you change the design, then all design-related information is automatically updated.

For example, if you add storey to a building, or adjust the street layout, then all of the floor areas, residential densities, costs, values, energy use etc are updated automatically and instantaneously.

What are the benefits?

In any urban master plan, there is a huge amount of information to keep track of - floor areas, densities, costs, values, parking spaces etc - and it is very time consuming and expensive to re-calculate all of this information every time a design is changed.

CityCAD does all this number-crunching automatically, so the urban designer is relieved of tedious information management and is free to concentrate on design quality.

How does it relate to other design and planning software?

It is not a detailed architectural or engineering CAD program like AutoCAD or Microstation, and neither is it a larger scale GIS (Geographic Information System) covering large areas.

It is a City Information Modeling tool, optimized for master plans between 1 hectare and about 2000 hectares in size.

CityCAD is designed to work with existing software, and can exchange data in DXF (Drawing Interchange Format), XLS (Microsoft Excel format) and several image formats.

Environmental Analysis

CityCAD can analyse a wide range of environmental and quality of life indicators and can estimate the carbon footprint of a development based on different density scenarios and assumptions about energy and transport use.

The UK Eco Towns program has been controversial at times - CityCAD Analysis can enable an informed and objective debate about individual proposals, based on measurable criteria.

A backlash against the environmental movement seems likely at the moment, and it has become increasingly important that decisions are based on objective analysis. CityCAD has a critical role to play in providing objective analysis of the environmental performance of new master plans or Eco Towns.

In addition to the purely environmental analysis, CityCAD makes it possible to calculate livability and quality of life indicators that would have previously been too time-consuming.

CityCAD can calculate

the average distance from a dwelling to an area of green space, or a convenience store, or a bus stop, or to the nearest health service.
the number of people living within 5 min walk of a bus stop, helping to predict the viability of local public transport services
urban design characteristics such as active frontage, graphs showing activity throughout the 24-hour cycle, and indicators such as the number of dwellings per entrance.

About Holistic City

Holistic City is a new software company based in London, which was set up by Chris Sharpe and Svet Pelipenko in 2005.

The company's aim is to create 'technology for livable cities' - technical solutions designed to help all those involved with designing and planning new urban communities.

About CityCAD

CityCAD began as a research project that applied BIM (Building Information Modeling) principles to the urban design scale, and a prototype software product codenamed 'Masterplanner' was created in early 2005.

Holistic City released a small street design tool called Streetscape in 2005, which was later upgraded to Streetscape Pro in 2007. This is available for download from our website completely free of charge.Streetscape Pro has been downloaded by companies, universities and other organizations all over the world.

Holistic City would like to stay in close contact with users of their software, and plan to continue development of CityCAD. The Livability and Quality of Life Analysis will be the focus of research and development in the coming months. For more information visit http://www.holisticcity.co.uk.

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