Taking a New Road: InfraWorks for Public Engagement

DAN CAMPBELL: So a little bit about myself. I'm Dan Campbell. I'm a systems analyst with the city of Vancouver in the GIS group. And as you'll see, as part of the presentation, my background is in planning and urban design. So I've been involved with public engagement pretty much my entire time with the city. And what I want to touch on is what you see here.

And warning you in advance, there are going to be lots of opinions and lots of contradictory statements. So if you feel you can catch out, by all means, because I'm in conflict with myself on many of these statements. So I want to, first of all, start out a little bit about the Vancouver context, so you can understand why engagement is important and what kind of special issues we're dealing with. Then just talk generally about engagement. What do we actually mean by public engagement? And then dive into three specific case studies that we've worked with over the past couple of years; sea level rise; redevelopment of station area and neighborhood in the Vancouver Joyce-Collingwood; and the last kind of major redevelopment site in the city, Northeast False Creek.

Then finally some general observations. Whoops. I'll get it right. So for those of you who don't know Vancouver. That's where we are, up there. On the edge of the Pacific Ocean. And these are a couple of more facts about the city that give importance to engagement in the city. Right now-- this is a fairly recent ranking from The Economist magazine-- we're rated as the third-most liveable city in the world. We actually have been number one in the past, so once you've been number one the pressure's always on you to get back up there again.

So there's kind of a sense in the city that everybody's always thinking about, where we are, the importance of the city. And in conflict with this question of is the-- oh, yeah, the fact that for those of you who don't know Vancouver, you actually probably do know Vancouver, just not as Vancouver because we have such a vibrant film and TV industry. So all these shows currently in production are all in Vancouver. So if you've seen any of these shows, you've seen Vancouver, you just don't know it.

The other aspect of Vancouver, in conflict with the most liveable city, is it's the most expensive city now in North America to live in. So here is a $1.2-million house-- actually, I think this from last year, it's probably worth a lot more now. So when you start to get into these kinds of issues, you realize that people are really concerned about development and change in the city because if things continue to get more and more expensive, of course, it creates a lot of problems.

I was traced back when modern public engagement started with the city, and it comfortably goes back to 1970. And this is actually the area that I mentioned earlier, Northeast False Creek, that we'll actually be talking about in detail in a bit. But in 1970, like most North American cities, there was a big freeway plan being proposed for the city that could cut through this area, go through the waterfront, et cetera.

And there was a lot of public protest. And it ended up saving one of the neighborhoods. The project was canceled, and all that was really built is what you see here, these viaducts. But that resulted in a big change in a council and a real embracing of the need to engage the public in ongoing development issues. And that continued on.

So there is this acknowledgment that, within the city, that public engagement actually improves the end product. And it's been very much an integral part of planning ever since then. Though, I think, generally, a lot of people would agree about four or five years ago, we started to slip. And I think it was just because resources were getting too strained. There was so many issues. How could we-- and people were starting to feel left out again, that their voices weren't being heard. And so we're always looking for cost-effective, efficient ways of actually reaching and dealing with the public.

So why is public engagement important to me? So I date myself right back to the planning department. And these were my public engagement tools, an overhead projector, tracing paper, felt pens. And we did the best that we could in those days going out and trying to talk about the public, but, in retrospect, I think we were a little arrogant, and a little ill-informed sometimes, and overconfident in a lot of what we were doing. But a lot of that was really because of the limitations of the tools that were available to us.

Because I can remember going out to meetings and talking about, yeah, we're going to change the density, double or triple it, but clever design will deal with all your issues in terms of overlook and shadow. It will be fine. Well, it probably wasn't fine. So I think I'm interested in public engagement now so I don't end up here. So does anybody know what this building is, by any chance? It's the world court of the Hague.

So I always worry about being called out for crimes against humanity, in terms of not really getting people to the issues that were important. I really-- actually not joking, I do think about it that when I think about decisions that were made in the past. And if we only had larger context, or better analysis, or more opinions that the outcome would have been very, very different. And being aware of that really does influence how you reach out and deal with the public.

So why InfraWorks for public engagement? And I know that Autodesk, right now, is very interested in focusing on InfraWorks as a design tool for roads, systems, transportation, et cetera. But, for those of us that I think have been working for it for a long time, we recognize this Swiss Army knife aspect of it as well. It's the tool that can do a lot of things moderately well.

And I think that's something that we need in the city. We recognize that we have limited resources, sometimes limited skills. Good enough is often the driving factor. What can we actually get done out of the box, so to speak? And sometimes looking at InfraWorks, that's very much-- it's a direct role. It's the leading tool that we'll use. Other times, it plays more of a supporting role, in terms of dealing with data, getting data into other applications, et cetera.

And I think if we can make a reference back to Ghostbusters, in 1984, and Egon's famous words were, "Print is dead." Well, I think any of us, regardless of all the wonderful web tools, and VR, and other things are going on, one way or another, we still rely on print. Now that print may not be to a plotter. It might not actually be true hard copy, but I think, without doubt, the-- probably, if somebody said, what tool do you use the most in InfraWorks? It's the Create Snapshot tool.

That is the question of taking-- getting some content directly and immediately from the application. And maybe it's in a printed report. Maybe it's in a web page. Maybe it's on a large display panel, might be on an LCD display. It doesn't matter. That is sort of the driving force.

The other aspect, I think is really powerful, is that it is very much the black hole of aggregation. I think any of you who may have similar experience in a municipal environment, we work with so many file formats, so many different kinds of submissions. And I think if you're familiar with InfraWorks, you've probably gone through the usual main screen where you can connect to a Shapefile, or SketchUp file. But it's fascinating when you actually go choose that other one, that generic window, and you get into all these amazing Open Geospatial Consortium files that you can have access to.

And that just really gives us that kind of flexibility. We know that whatever people throw at us, we will have the ability to assimilate that data and probably reproduce it in whatever kind of format we would like. And it's amazing how many of these we've used. I know that we've used the Map Info and a lot of the other strange means as well.

The actual first time we started working with InfraWorks for public engagement-- and actually until very recently, we never said InfraWorks is a public engagement tool. Nobody would come to us and say, OK, we want to start this program using InfraWorks. It was always very much slipping it in through the back door or other aspects of the work. In this case, this work started about three to four years ago. And it was looking at the results of once again trying to create great density in our downtown and west end area.

And there was limitations in terms of what the old zoning was plus view protection guidelines. So in this case, they asked me to do some work in terms of actually just taking some SketchUp models that people were developing and putting them into the context of the model. Well, it was just a question of actually working with the other people on the team. As they're standing over my shoulder and I pulled this SketchUp model in. And we'd look at it. Well, that's good. Let's put another one in, rotating it around. They begin to realize, wow, this is actually not a bad tool for actually explaining things.

So with a little bit of fear, I loaded it up onto one of our city's underpowered laptops and then agreed to go out to a series of public meetings with this model but truncated, just West End area. And it performed adequately well. But what I found so great was at one point-- and as any kind of planning initiative, it was very contentious. People were confused and frustrated. Didn't feel like they were making any headway. And one person at the meeting said, I wish I had seen this model at the beginning of the process. Suddenly I understand what we're talking about now.

And that was reassuring to us that we're on the right track. That, yeah, there is a purpose and role for this kind of a tool. And we have done that a few times, again, just trucking the laptop out to the meetings. And, of course, the limitations, for us, in most cases, has been that we've been limited in terms of how much context or how much detail we can load onto a city-issued laptop.

So we go way back with InfraWorks. Before there was InfraWorks in the city, our first city model dated from 1996. And we bought it from a consultant who did its work for us doing our view study. And the entire city model fit onto high density floppy drives. That was the beginning of it all. But in terms of actually working with InfraWorks, we actually partnered with Autodesk along with Salzburg, Austria, and Incheon, Korea, back in 2008, with this digital cities initiatives.

It was a precursor of the smart city project. And they were looking at what kind of tools would cities need to do city business. And that actually led to the Autodesk purchase of Land eXplorer which was the next step for us. So we started working with Land eXplorer in 2009. And what was opportune for us, while that was happening, it was just before we staged the 2010 Winter Olympics. So the lidar was flown for the city. And we inherited really good 2.5D building footprints with attribute information on building height and roof slope, et cetera.

So that gave us the impetus to move forward with a lot of content right away. And then we went into Infrastructure Modeler, of course. And then today we're working with InfraWorks and-- oh, I was just checking as I was putting together the slide and I realized that an old version, I think of one of Autodesk models of the city Vancouver, is still the masthead on the BIMagination blog.

So where do we get the data that we work with all the time? So we have Pictometry buildings for our downtown core and some of the surrounding areas. Model Builder for any of the exterior contacts. So things like our North Shore mountains, or the airport, or anything that we want larger context for. Orthophotos, once again for the Pictometry. We had our own lidar flown for the first time in 2013. And that was-- you'll see some more about that when we talk about the sea level rise. Of course, abundant GIS data.

Quite often, going cap in hand to architectural firms where we say, please, sir, may we have a copy of your model? And it usually works into more of a barter process where we'll extract some content for them, and we'll trade back and forth. Of course, the web, pulling things from dodgy sources and hoping that they're actually the right size. And more frequently than we would like, going back to microfiche or hard copy plans to digitize new content.

We're not a big number of InfraWorks users. I'm in a GIS group, and there's three of us working there with three licenses. Five licenses in planning, mostly in our urban design and neighborhood planning groups. And one license in engineering as you'll see how that connects in with some of the public engagement initiatives. So as I was mentioning, I was trying to-- one of the things I like about InfraWorks is how much you can do out of the box. And I realized that as I was saying that the out-of-the-box is now an outdated phrase because there are no boxes for software anymore.

So we have to come up with a new term about how we use it. Out-of-the-web-download just doesn't have the same ring to it. But when we've done any kind of detailed public initiative thing, one way or another we've also happen to use, in most cases, the Photoshop, Illustrator, ArcGIS Pro, MapInfo, FME, 3ds Max, SketchUp, Premiere Pro. That's usually to take it to the next level. But it is amazing, I think, how much we can get good enough out-of-the-box.

So this is the extent of our city model. So the area's about 115 square kilometers, 104,000 buildings. And now that we're able to work with the adaptable tree models, we can get all 140,000 street trees in, as well, which has really changed our perception of it. And this shows the extent of the Pictometry building. So these are ones generated photogrammically from the photos, and creating the nice-skinned buildings which are, I think, really critical as I'll talk about public engagement.

So what is public engagement? I know a lot of us, this is how we feel about it. And the actual definition, though-- I found this one, Wikipedia of course. Public engagement is a term to describe the involvement of specialists listening to and developing their understanding of and interacting with non-specialists. That's not bad. But I'm treating it is a much more of an umbrella statement. Sometimes what I would call public engagements, others might call general communication. I think the borders between these two tend to blur.

If somebody said, what do I see the specific objectives of public engagement. I said, making the hidden visible, making the abstract not abstract, giving the full story, reaching out, pulling others in, and improving the decision-making process. I could extend this infinitely, but I think this distills it down for a lot of the work that we've done. If you think about engagement, about all the projects that are going on, all the things that the public is concerned about, and the opportunity to spur engagement is pretty small. It's remarkably small.

And there's so many missed opportunities, and, for the most part, it's the major projects, the issues that are facing the cities, that get the engagement. And I think this is a bit of an issue. And I have some thoughts about how to deal with that. So what initiates public engagement? And it's interesting. It's usually not the public. Least, not directly. It is the process, in spite of all the web tools where people-- we use Talk Vancouver which is based on Vision Critical. In the past we've used Place Speak.

This is a, I think, similar to a lot of web tools that people may be using in a municipal city environment where people can talk about what the issues are, what's important to them. But how much that filters through to individual work units and groups in the department. It's not always clear. It's sometimes in of a siloed process, as well. But I would say for the most part, council-- major council initiatives, major projects, or where the public has really made their voice heard, that's when the public engagement process starts.

And I was trying to find the perfect image that sums up public engagement for local government. And I think this is it because we recognize it's really beneficial. And if we do it regularly, we're going to defer big problems later on. But we don't do it as frequently as we should, and we're really reluctant to do it. So I have two text-heavy slides, and after that, it's a little more free going.

Once again, the key principles provide an opportunity for participants who lack specialist knowledge of the area concerned to engage in a two-way exchange with those possessing specialist knowledge and to present their perspectives. And I think that's really a fundamental one because I can think of all the times where I would go out to public meetings with architectural drawings that we thought were very clear. Plonked them down the table. Everybody starts looking at them. There's some discussion and you realize every individual person on that table is interpreting those drawings in a different way. There's their lack of common consensus about the information coming up.

So what we want to make sure is that, at the very least, we provide enough supporting information to ensure an understanding the complex and technical issues because people don't understand roadway design. They don't understand the issues of building construction. You have to make these things clear.

And the data resources involved in the activities within the process should be transparent. Participants should be able to audit what is being presented. And I'll talk a little bit about that more in a bit, too. Because the expectation is now that we don't just tell them what this is, people in the public want to be able to verify and check that out themselves.

And I think the process of engagement shouldn't be exclusionary, for example-- and we touch on this a bit when we talk about sea level rise. VR might be a very good way to present a complex project, but if you can only pull in a small number of people to do it, or if other technology excludes people, it's probably not the best way. How can we make it highly inclusionary? And the line between one-way communication and public participation, like I mentioned, can be fuzzy. And we shouldn't confuse one with the other. They're complementary processes.

So here is my diagram of the engagement ring so we start at the top with the idea. This is the project, the concern. And from that, we cycle down to the right to the excitement. We want to make sure that-- we want engagement to include people being engaged, not just a sheet of information sent out to someone where people just toss it aside because it's not really getting them in any way interested in what's happening. And going down to the bottom, make sure that there's an option for questions.

Once again, not having that one-way push communication. Cycle back all the information that's coming into the process. And finally, communication, the whole time there has to be a back and forth flow of opinion and ideas and not one way, never one way. So I tried to put together a list of the right ways to deal with public engagement and realized there probably isn't one. There's not a one size fits all. It depends on each specific case, combination of participants, tools, objectives.

But I do have some things I can recommend to avoid with public engagement. This sense of done. We've been very guilty about this. We'll have it on a list of things to do, and this is cycling back to the dental floss, that at some point we have to say, engage the public. The other aspect of it is this quote from Douglas Adams from Hitchhiker's Guide, making the actual information difficult to get at.

So if I can read this through. Someone is very concerned about their house being demolished. But the plans were on display. On display, I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them. That's the display department. With a flashlight. Ah, well, this lights had probably gone. So had the stairs. But look, you found the notice, didn't you? Yes, said Arthur, I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying beware of the Leopard.

And so often, we've had people come into a public engagement process say, I didn't know this is happening. Why didn't you tell me? I wanted to be involved. Now all the decisions are made. The other thing to avoid is seduction. And I'll pick on this slide here because this is a building currently under construction by Bjarke Ingels, the Danish firm Vancouver host. Spectacular building, was going to be one of the best buildings ever built.

But I do have concerns about this kind of-- I don't know if it was a marketing image or an early conceptual image but the light sources are all wrong. The background has been foreshortened It's not actually trying to tell me the real story about the building, it's trying to sell me the building. And I think that's where tools like InfraWorks begin to differentiate things because we're dealing with quantifiable information that people can double check. We're not trying to seduce. We're trying to inform.

And we'll talk about Benjamin Disraeli because this whole question of deception. There are lies, damn lies, and visualizations. So that's what we don't want to do. I think that we have an obligation to do the exact opposite. Then in terms of the auditing everybody wants to get in the act. That's a good thing. The informed and often very skilled amateur. I know that many times in public engagement process, the person on the other side has at least the technical skills that I have and will challenge me every step of the way in terms of the information that's being presented.

So the importance of being able to export the data and have it verified. And, of course, we've got our entire-- we're beginning to address this with something like open data so that if they look at the model in InfraWorks, they can take that same data and perhaps open it up in another application or whatever tools they have to try to verify it. Though that begins to establish its own set of problems. This is from a few years ago, actually the West End plan I showed you at the very beginning, in terms of what was actually being affected by the view quarters.

And there was some very specific concerns in the information and somebody said, well, I had taken the proposal as a SketchUp model and brought it into Google Earth and it's completely different than what you're showing in my InfraWorks model with my version of it. And we realized, yeah, we're sort of working with the same data. But the resolution of the train in the model from Google Earth is going to be completely different than the resolution to the information that's here. So you have to be very careful when you're putting the data out there that people understand the constraints that come into play in terms of resolution in detail and accuracy.

So I get these kinds of things go on forever. These kinds of issues. Another thing that is an issue perhaps is that InfraWorks works models tend to look like InfraWorks models for the most part. And probably, that's not a bad thing. So I went through, did a Google search for InfraWorks models, pulled a whole bunch of them up and just pasted them on this page. And we have some consistent things like the surface of the pavement looks the same. We see the same street lights, definitely, the same street tree models.

And on one hand, maybe it gets a little dull. You get fatigue of looking at the same models. On the other hand, thinking about back to the concerns about seduction. Because it's a tool kit now, people can actually focus in on what the issues are and not worry so much about the prettiness of the model and other specifics. But I will contradict this statement a little later on. So I can think about that kind of approach to an InfraWorks model for engagement much more like a Lego thing, that you're using the same components over and over again. People recognize that and respond accordingly.

One of the nice things about presenting late, you get to update your presentation as more news becomes available. And the statement that Autodesk and Esri put out together about allowing our shared customers to build anything, anywhere. Well, I know what a lot of the public in Vancouver would say about that. So you're going to build anything, anywhere you want? No. This kind of anything, anywhere also includes that the public is going to have the same kind of comments on anything, anywhere, as well. It's not, once again, a push process.

And sometimes it's very much a collegial, adversarial relationship that-- I know that a few years ago at AU I've sat in on a 3ds Max panel on visualization. And everybody went around the table, talking about the work that you do. And most of them are involved with architectural visualization, and real estate promos, and such. And I realize, I'm the one out of step. They're all the outlaws, but I'm the Sheriff, or vice versa. That I'm the one that's trying to say, wait a sec. I don't know if I totally trust this.

And it's hard for the city because if we think back to the untouchables and try not to be bring a knife to a gunfight. I saw a great presentation just a couple of days ago, talking about VR and 3D. And in the example that they were showing, they were talking about actually putting together a specific VR presentation, in a box, with the viewer for advertising a new building development. So people put that on, be able to look with a gear VR, look at the application. And if you think about it, I think it's great. It's wonderfully clever, but can you think of a more blinkered experience? The context is being defined by one party rather than all parties that potentially should be consulted.

And what I'm finding the biggest challenge, in terms of trying to get some of these tools out, is-- what's more challenging in engaging the public is actually engaging the co-workers in management, making them recognize that there are different tools and different ways of approaching this. And it's not always easy, and, as I mentioned, it's usually slip it in the back door. Letting people become accustomed to it and bring the tools into their workflows very slowly.

But thinking about the engagement time line and this whole question about when do people learn about a project, or is it a question of the beware of the leopard because they find out at the last moment because it hasn't been available. And I tried to position the dot where this actually usually happens is that we tend not to want to engage the public at that early conceptual stage. And when we get more into planning, we're a little bit more amenable to actually saying, OK, we're comfortable enough about the directions that we can probably bring them online.

But it's usually somewhere in that zone. And the public is wanting transparency. They don't want the late message. And to paraphrase, and as I did some research, I found out it really wasn't Otto Von Bismarck that said this, it was someone else. But Bismarck looked more interesting so I put him on the slide. And that laws are like sausages, it is best not to see them being made. And I think we feel our buildings, or roads, or so on.

But I'm wondering how open we can start to make our processes to expose the public early on. And if you think about it, if I go back five or six years, when people started suggesting open data, we were just saying, no, no, we make money from this data. Or we don't trust this data. It's not clean enough. It can't represent-- we aren't comfortable with it going out into the public. Now everyone has open data.

So what happens after open data? Are we maybe getting to the point where there may be expectations about open work? That we have to, within the entire process, begin to expose more of the decision making from the early stages onward. I think it's an actual possibility. And when you think about the whole aspect of smart cities, this may be an aspect that would have to be embedded to a smart city.

So at the city, who owns a public engagement process? And this can be difficult because I can come up, create what I think is a splendid way of actually conveying the information about a project using InfraWorks, but if it doesn't fit into our current web strategy about how do we embed this into the web, or if we get into issues about privacy. In the province I'm from, we have very strict laws. We cannot have anything in terms of private information that would be stored on a US server. So that can sometimes limit how we actually distribute the information out. So there's all these kinds of other people.

And we know that-- thinking about the shifts in time when I first started at the city, the individual planner engineer was very much involved with informing and engaging the public themselves. Now we have these kinds of layers where we have our corporate communications. We have our web teams and everything it has to go through. But we're creating all these really robust powerful tools, putting them in the hands of the individuals then we're saying, yeah, except you can't use in that way. So you have to work within the bureaucracy that you're in to make sure that there is a way of getting this technology out.

So now into some of their actual engagement studies. The first one is sea level rise where a coastal city and we are really concerned about what could end up happening with sea level rise. And the initial role for us was not necessarily public engagement. It was more data support. This was the first time we actually got the lidar. And we brought the lidar into InfraWorks to actually do some checking and analysis of it. And it was doing minor corrections if there was a question of a project underway and excavation, making sure we fill that in. Sometimes what were noted as actual topographical features are actually piles of gravel and other things. It had to level those down. So working like that but then our sustainability group saw this in action and got really excited. And they said, well, can you actually go ahead and show us how this will actually be in worst case scenarios? I said sure, no problem. So this is, as you can see, a pretty basic InfraWorks model, very detailed information and accurate information about the extent of the potential sea level rise. I gave this to them. Really, can't wait for this. And the first thing they said, don't show this to anyone.

[LAUGHTER]

And this kind of thing that comes up again is that it looked too real. And it's an argument we get into all the time now. And I'm hoping that enough time has passed and things have changed. But there's always still the feeling that we can't do it at the photo reel end. We have to take it through and let somebody do some rough sketches to make sure that people realize we haven't made all those decisions. So because it's rough and on paper, that implies it. And I think that is no longer valid. I think the majority of people recognize that with the tools that are available, things that are very early preliminary stage can be at this level of quality.

And so this is the same model with more recent information with our Pictometry information in it as well. And I wanted to do this because projects never go away. And I know that I've been very guilty of this is not doing proper management of data and such so that when it comes back and I could try to refresh my model or get it up to date again, I realize I can't remember where all the data sources were, et cetera. So I'm trying to be a little more disciplined and more rigorous about this, thinking that we have to implement this in a much more formal way to make sure this happens.

So once we did this then we actually did some more integration in terms of-- since we were frightening people, we had to say something about what could we show them that will reassure them a bit. So I put together some-- stealing the Thames barrier concept and repurposing it at the entrance of False Creek. So I modeled these up in 3ds Max and put that through. But the main thing that we wanted to do was to actually-- and this is something that repeats itself again and again-- how things are now, how things will be. So we put together a series of before-and-after videos.

And you have to excuse me, this is an aging laptop. I have to do the videos outside of PowerPoint. So the first one is on-- let's listen to that. Let's see. There. So this was just a question of actually creating two proposals in InfraWorks, one before and one after. And worked very well. The only problem is that there's no tools in the application to do fade from one to another. So this is one of the situations where we actually had to take the two output videos into Premiere, and thus do the very simple fade between the two of them.

And the next one is the same kind of concept. This case, a little more-- is it showing? By the Fraser river were some really substantial changes in where the flooding would be. But everybody was very pleased because these things could be produced so quickly and without any kind of real expertise in video production. It's just good enough for government work. OK.

And here I am with my Oculus Rift. And people got really excited. They thought this would be a really good pilot project to do with VR, and I got really excited to. This first started about a year ago. And at that point, we're wondering, well, do we put it into Unity? Do we use Stingray? What's the best approach? And then we actually stepped back and thought, well, what are we actually achieving by doing this in VR at this stage that we're not achieving with videos? And we weren't sure were we going to do it for the head-mounted headsets. If we did, were we going to do it for public meetings and we have to take the equipment out. And if we did it with standalones, how do we provide the context?

And we realized, we didn't know how to actually deliver the VR efficiently in a public engagement process. We know everybody wants to do a VR public engagement but if we're going to do it, we want to do it well, and make a good first impression, and make sure that people come back to it again. So that's one of the benefits I've been getting out of AU this year is getting enough context, which I hope will enable us to make some more informed decisions about which way to go.

The other thing that became apparent to us is that-- this was actually just happening a few days ago when there was a King Tide situation in Vancouver. And this is using the Esri Story Map where we're having the public go out, and actually take photos, and know where high tide points were, and doing kind of crowdsourcing to populate this map. And it was so opportune, thinking about the Esri Autodesk announcement because I was really disappointed. We have this really great InfraWorks model, and then we have this crowdsourcing thing. They're just two separate packages, silos. There's no way of bringing them together in a cohesive experience.

So I'm hoping that in the future, we'll be able to do something in a much more cohesive manner. So what did we really notice? Well, as I mentioned, the distinct paths of delivery. We still had to use the third-party tools. Gotten a clear role of VR at this stage. My bad model-management skills. The fear of looking too real. And we did not-- And I would have liked to have actually looked at the actual InfraWorks flood module to see how it compared with some of the analysis from the consultant. And the majority of the video was really easy to produce. Throughout the city, we-- everybody is kind of a generalist. They do a lot of things. And we can't expect people to have that level of expertise, so we want a tool that can do it all.

The Joyce-Collingwood area. I was actually involved with some of the work back in the '80s when this first happened, so it was interesting to come back again. And this is an area, once again, looking at increasing in density, improving the public realm. And there was a lot of concern in the public about the increased density, and what was going to happen, and all the different scenarios that were being proposed. How much height would actually be acceptable in this area?

And a series of public meetings were established and in this case, once again, it was not a question of can we use InfraWorks for something. They came to me because what they actually wanted to do was to produce a 3D-printed model. They thought that that would be the best way to actually connect with the public in the public meetings. So in this case, it's this area that you're seeing here. It was a low area in terms of the overall context that's there at the moment. So I said, sure, I can use our InfraWorks model to create a 3D-printed model. No problem.

It was an absolute nightmare. So the proposals were all being put together in SketchUp. The actual model and all the context was in InfraWorks. And we did some-- quickly we realized we had to do some work to actually clean up the model. I always thought that topology and GIS data was an abstract concept. It had no real meaning in reality until you realize that anything where there's a gap in the 3D printing, everything would just ooze out.

We kept trying to refine the model again and again. Reduced the number-- well, actually that was one of the biggest issues we had is that with our wonderful lidar data. The train was just perfect. Far too dense to get into a 3D-printed model directly. So it was a question of actually having to take it in, again and again, into 3ds Max using the ProOptimizer tools to try to reduce the number of polygons in the surface but still keep the fidelity that we're looking. At one point out of desperation, I decided to I'll go back and try using Model Builder and use its train instead. Wasn't close to matching the precision or where things were.

So it was just a question of back and forth, back and forth, and finally-- and even involved FME at one point. But it finally did print. And it did work out. It's a four by six model. And, as you see over on the side here, what we had was a series of about six or seven different options that you could pop in and out. And those ended up just being produced from individual proposals in InfraWorks. But looking back, we were so caught up into making sure that this model was ready for this deadline of these public meetings, we never actually thought about trying to-- there's probably a lot of benefits of actually using the model itself in terms of maybe canned animations or actually having the model there to interact with with the physical model. It would have been a really great opportunity, so I'm looking for now something coming up in the city where we can do this in tandem, a physical model and InfraWorks on demand at the actual physical meetings.

So what did I learn? That we didn't take advantage of the complimentary technologies. And, as well, this has always been a concern of me, when we talk about city models what it really comes down to, again, is buildings. Buildings, buildings, buildings. And that's all we really had in this model. We didn't actually talk about the public realm we did not talk about trees. We did not talking about the transportation. And sometimes when you begin to focus in on just building massing and such, independent of that it could be a little disappointing.

So I think the big issue that came to us, one model cannot do it all. We can't just have our standard InfraWorks model and say, ahh, from this, we're not going to create a 3D model. It can be a good information source. It can help manage versions and control that. But at some point, you're going to have to take it out and do cleanup, and manipulation, and other tools.

So finally, in terms of scenarios, we come to Northeast False Creek. It's the last remaining piece of large undeveloped land. And it's the-- if you remember the initial slide I showed you of the freeway system-- that is where-- what will be happening is the viaducts will be removed and city land underneath them opened up for development. So it's a huge, huge project for us. And the whole idea is create a vibrant resilient community.

So this is the first time that people were now familiar enough with the tools that people said, well, we would like to look at using InfraWorks right from the beginning or close to the beginning as a tool for both design and engagement. So here is a rather blurry screenshot. And right away, we got into what I'm calling the Goldilocks dilemma. So on one hand the team was starting to produce sketches like this. And still very much a part of the standard planning process where that kind of open, vague, give-a-sense-of-character image is produced. So those are being produced. As well, people were working in Civil 3D, producing these kinds of drawings.

And in a way, my take is neither of them are really appropriate for communicating with the public. One is too open-ended. The other one is too much of a closed-language proposal. Because I think the majority of people looking at the Civil 3D drawing, they might well be looking at that. They can't understand it. They can interpret it. So it's a question that is it possible that something like InfraWorks starts to become that kind of comfortable middle spot between these two. That it's still open enough that people can project their own thoughts into it, but the clarity is there to actually understand it's quantifiable based on actual data.