The City of San Diego, California’s second largest city with roughly 1.4 million people, joined UrbanFootprint’s California Civic program this year to enhance their community planning process. With 52 community planning areas, the City of San Diego Planning Department typically has five to seven community plan updates in progress at any given time. The City’s Planning Department continues to integrate the use of technology to help improve and cost-efficiently manage the land use analysis and scenario planning process required for each community plan update.

Community plan updates are a critical part of the City’s planning process to implement the City of San Diego’s award-winning General Plan, Climate Action Plan, and Mayor Kevin L. Faulconer’s ‘Housing SD’ Plan which plans for workforce and affordable housing near transit and employment centers. The City looks forward to using UrbanFootprint’s robust data library and advanced scenario planning capabilities to further incorporate technology into their planning process as they start new community plan updates, including this year’s Mira Mesa Community Plan Update.

UrbanFootprint is designed to provide cost-efficient data, scenario planning, and analytics solutions to give communities a holistic analysis of potential plan impacts in real-time. UrbanFootprint’s extensive data library allows planners and policymakers to examine existing conditions in a matter of minutes, rather than days or weeks. Plus, the ability to quickly create and analyze the potential outcomes of land use scenarios in terms of emissions, vehicle-miles traveled, accessibility, risk and resilience, household costs, and beyond, serves to facilitate data-driven community conversations about sustainable, equitable growth.

“UrbanFootprint has the potential to incorporate technology into an innovative planning process to perform scenario planning analysis which can aid in further detailed urban design studies and visualizations,” shares Mike Hansen, Planning Department Director for the City of San Diego. “The City’s Planning Department is excited to be a part of the California Civic program and is thrilled to leverage this new technology in our Community Plan Update program to envision, plan, and create a world class city.”