Challenge: Challenging the Status Quo to Save Time and Resources.

DPZ is a world-renowned urban planning and design firm. Founded in 1980 by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two founding members of the Congress for New Urbanism, DPZ’s work is dedicated to creating environmentally resilient and economically thriving places. The DPZ team brings nearly 40 years of experience and expertise to planning projects at every level; from large-scale regional plans to the detailed nuances of regulatory zoning and code reform.

As an industry-leading firm, DPZ always looks for new ways to differentiate and scale their planning processes while maintaining or improving project quality. While the team had built advanced in-house tools, they felt they were spending a lot of time creating custom solutions to support one-time projects.

“For several regional planning projects, we had previously built in-house tools to support development pattern mapping, but we hadn’t built them to be easily reusable,” shared Matthew Lambert, DPZ Partner. “We were spending a lot more time than necessary developing these tools to support one-off projects.” DPZ recognized the need to find a software solution that would scale across all their projects and chose UrbanFootprint.

Solution: Built-In Data and Scenario Analysis Delivers Agile Planning

The DPZ team immediately experienced significant time and cost savings with UrbanFootprint. Previously, DPZ used spreadsheet-based tools that delivered the results they needed but required weeks of setup work. Each project setup called for cleaning and curating various data sources, determining how to manage analytics, deciding what to compare, and integrating all of this information for map exhibits.

As Matthew Lambert described, “Compared to our past scenario planning processes, UrbanFootprint has allowed us to move significantly faster during our project setup phase. It allows us to do quick, in-depth analytical work that would take us much longer to do with GIS alone, streamlining the process of pulling from different data sources and facilitating easy visual analysis.”