Enhancing Decision-making in Urban Centres with ArcGIS Dashboards

Learn how the City of Kelowna’s Long Range Policy Planning department is making the most out of ArcGIS Dashboards for planning the city’s five Urban Centres.

Recently, the Community Planning team at Esri Canada worked with the City of Kelowna in developing the Urban Centres Explorer, a web-based ArcGIS Dashboards application aimed at enhancing and modernizing the City's data-driven decision-making processes. This dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of each of Kelowna’s five Urban Centres and presents data on population, housing, daily needs, transportation, climate and environment, and future directions.

Urban Centre Explorer showing an overview of the housing tab for Downtown

Using a dashboard as the solution helps address Kelowna’s growth challenges by providing access to real-time information, enabling faster adaptation to new changes, and reducing the need for developing plans from scratch by updating future directions promptly. New information will be added to the dashboard as it becomes available, so the application will continue to evolve over time and improve in providing an accurate picture of the Urban Centres.

Ahmed Mustafa, Planner Specialist with the City’s Long Range Policy Planning department, presented the Urban Centres Dashboard at the June 23rd Council meeting as part of their Thriving Urban Centres project:

“A good neighbourhood plan uses data on demographics, land use, transport, and community needs to guide smart, local decisions and plan ahead. This technology brings it all together, is more flexible than static maps—which quickly get outdated—caters to a wider audience and can add a future vision to create a dynamic, evolving plan.”

Designing for many audiences

The dashboard was designed with several different audiences identified as potential users: City of Kelowna staff, Council members, building developers, and the general public. It features spatial filtering with a header selector, so users have the option to view indicators and metrics for a specific Urban Centre, or for all Urban Centres. Users can also download summarized data from the chart elements, which allows for take-away analysis exercises.

A mobile view of the dashboard was also composed within the ArcGIS Dashboards editing interface because it was identified during our requirements gathering phase that many public users would be accessing the application on a mobile device. This mobile view gives a more condensed presentation of many of the same elements seen on the desktop view.

Views of the Urban Centre Explorer on mobile devices

With data coming from Model City, BC Assessment, Environics, and other City data sources, it was not possible to load all the fields required from existing feature layers into each of our dashboard elements. To synthesize some of the datasets used within these elements, we composed Arcade expressions that were set as a data source. This allowed us to move forward in producing an application without having to merge or reconfigure large datasets that we were unfamiliar with.

Leveraging ArcGIS Instant Apps for easy editing

To assist with future decision-making, it was a requirement for us that City of Kelowna planning staff must be able to perform edits on the Future Vision layer. This layer presents the upcoming initiatives that the City is taking in each of the Urban Centres as a series of points, polygons, and polylines with annotated label text highlighting different features in the map window.

Planning Future Vision Editor showing edits being performed in Capri Landmark

“We’ve faced challenges completing urban centre plans—there are five Urban Centres in Kelowna, and by the time we finished all five, the earliest ones were already outdated and needed to be redone. The Future Vision layer in this tool, which represents the key directions of the plans, helps address this by allowing all five Urban Centres plans to be updated much more easily. The beauty of this layer is that non-GIS staff can manage it with ease, and any Official Community Plan amendments or zoning changes can be incorporated far more quickly than with static plans, making our planning process significantly faster.” – Ahmed Mustafa, Planner Specialist, City of Kelowna

We determined that the ArcGIS Instant Apps Sidebar template would provide non-technical users with a straightforward and intuitive editing experience. By composing an application focused on these edits as its sole purpose, planning staff can quickly and easily add new Future Vision data without having to know all the ins-and-outs of editing GIS data. The results appear instantly within the Urban Centres Dashboard as a publicly visible hosted feature layer view loaded within the dashboard’s web map and can be toggled on as the first item in the dashboard’s layer list.

Urban Centre Explorer showing an overview of the Future Vision layer for Capri Landmark

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