City Centre 3, currently under construction in Surrey’s Health and Technology District. Credit: Stanbol Studios

How do you evaluate the merits of a development application? In Kelowna, they now use a predictive modelling tool called ModelCity.

ModelCity is a proprietary tool developed by the City of Kelowna that connects and synthesizes data to model scenarios and allow evidence-based decision making at the level of city, neighborhood, or parcel.

“The tool consolidates a wide range of interconnected data on existing developments and infrastructure servicing costs to create a holistic summary of how individual parcels contribute to our community across a wide array of factors,” says City of Kelowna’s Johannes Säufferer, RI. “This gives us insight into patterns, connections, and relationships that were not clearly visible before.”

The results of modelled scenarios are linked to the City’s land use controls, meaning that there is a direct link between the specific land use decisions made by staff and council today and the how the city will look in the future.

“For example, using this tool, one can gauge the theoretical impact of OCP policies that encourage suburban growth versus urban growth, or quantify the net taxation impact associated with a newly proposed hillside single-family community,” explains Säufferer. “ModelCity effectively acts as a highly customized Kelowna-based version of the original SimCity, allowing us to create and contrast realistic alternate-future ‘Kelownas’ based on different land use scenarios and land development priorities.”

Download Fall 2020

Read more in Säufferer’s “Kelowna’s Modelcity Aids Evidence-Based Decision Making” in the Fall 2020 edition of Input. Download Fall 2020

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