Salzburg, Austria, to Participate in Digital Cities Initiative

The city of Salzburg, Austria, will partner with Autodesk as the first pilot city in the company's new Digital Cities initiative. The announcement was made with the Mayor of Salzburg at the AGIT 2008 conference in Salzburg.

The Digital City initiative is a unique technology designed to provide a collaborative environment for visualizing, analyzing and simulating the future impact of urban design and development at a citywide scale. Salzburg is one of the great cultural and historic centers of Europe, and the project will help it integrate city data into a highly detailed 3D model of the city. This combination of city data with realistic visualization and simulation tools can allow Salzburg to view and interact with the city landscape, as well as analyze the impact of future urban planning, tourism and economic development projects before they are built.

"I am very pleased to announce the launch of this pilot project which holds considerable significance for modern urban administration," said Dr. Heinz Schaden, mayor of the city of Salzburg. "With Autodesk as a leader in design innovation and the University of Salzburg drawing on its many years of experience in the geo-information area, we have two internationally acknowledged partners joining forces to realize this future project. The digital city model will help cities like ours better understand the impact of proposed urban projects. This type of pilot program will help us better understand how we can create an attractive and sustainable future for Salzburg and its people."

Scientific personnel from Salzburg University's Center of Geo-information (Z_GIS) are involved with the implementation of Digital City for the city of Salzburg. "As a competence center for geo-information, we are pleased to be able to contribute to one of the most ambitious innovation projects worldwide, and to be able to do this in our home town of Salzburg. Thanks to this project, students can benefit from gaining decisive knowledge advantages and participating companies in Salzburg can develop services upon this new platform. In this way, the Z_GIS will be strongly oriented to economic, scientific and administrative interfaces."

"Salzburg is one of the most progressive, well known cities in the world and so they are a natural choice to participate as our first pilot city. Our Digital City technology can help the city and community of Salzburg communicate, collaborate, and deliver projects in a more effective -- and sustainable -- way," said Lisa Campbell, vice president, Autodesk Geospatial. "We are proud to work with them and our longstanding partner, the University of Salzburg, to create a business tool that will help Salzburg plan and operate sustainable development essential for tomorrow's high-performance cities and economies."

About Digital Cities Technology

A Digital City allows stakeholders from the public, city government, construction, and business communities to work together to understand how many different proposals could impact the urban environment by experiencing the future of the city before it becomes real.

The goal of this pilot program is for Salzburg to be able to bring together 3D models of above and below ground features in an open platform that supports secure and robust integration of CAD, building information modeling (BIM), geospatial, civil engineering, and infrastructure data over a wide geographic area. By combining this data with realistic visualization, analysis and simulation tools, a Digital City can deliver an intuitive and compelling way to understand the impact of plans and proposals from any point in time and from any point of view.