The buildingrooms and New_5 shapefiles were derived from the City’s open data building footprint shapefiles to represent the base units for 1211 hypothetical residential units spanning 10 high-rise buildings in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Supporting geospatial data and ancillary information were used to conduct spatial analyses in ArcGIS and CityEngine software to calculate the attribute values for each unit for eight evaluation criteria: the proximity to parks, schools, water, and Skytrain stations, and view, duration of direct sunlight, noise and air pollution level. The eight criteria were combined using the proposed 3D multicriteria evaluation method to conduct a suitability analysis in a 3D environment to determine the overall level of suitability of each unit, under five alternative weighting scenarios including three based on the preferences of different ‘resident types’. CityEngine software was used to compute the overall suitability scores and create a 3D model of the urban residential units by extruding unit shapefiles to their height (here termed ‘voxelization’). These tasks were performed by writing rule files using Computer-Generated Architecture (CGA), CityEngine’s unique programming language. The rule files used to calculate the overall suitability scores under the five alternative weighting scenarios, as well as those used to investigate the suitability of each unit based on each individual criterion, are included in the repository as text files.
The data files used to support the analysis are also included. These data were derived from the following publicly available resources:
• Bbbike Extracts OpenStreetMap
https://extract.bbbike.org/
Contains information licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License and following a fair usage policy
• City of Vancouver Open Data Portal
https://opendata.vancouver.ca/pages/home/
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver
• City of Vancouver VanMap
https://maps.vancouver.ca/portal/apps/sites/#/vanmap/
Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver
• Metro Vancouver Open Data Catalogue
http://www.metrovancouver.org/data
Contains information under the provisions of the Copyright Act for Metro Vancouver Regional District
• OpenStreetMap
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=2/71.3/-96.8
Contains information licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License
• Statistics Canada
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/92-169-X
Contains information licensed under the Statistics Canada Open License Agreement
Any reuse or redistribution of the data must acknowledge the original data sources accordingly.
As some sources prohibit data redistribution and publication, some of the geospatial data files used to conduct the research are not available.