HKS's static planning documents took ~5 months to produce and were often outdated by delivery in a fast-changing downtown.
Conventional tools (Autodesk, GeoBIM) were too complex, good for demos but struggled on real, large-scale projects.
HKS used Giraffe, a geospatial modeling tool for urban planning, to craft, refine, and present evolving scenarios in one place for a 900-acre neighborhood study. Key features: geospatial accuracy, iterative modeling of land use and program distribution, real-time built-in metrics (areas, heights, capacities), and interactive web-hosted deliverables replacing static PDFs. Methodology reused on Buford Highway, Santa Cruz, and Auckland Stadium projects.
Scenario work that once took ~four months could be done in as little as three weeks.
Team reported doing in ~five minutes what would normally take up to two weeks with traditional methods.
Client received a dynamic, web-hosted model instead of a timestamped PDF, changing how stakeholders engaged with the plan.
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