CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive

18 December 2007

Implementation Investments

City of Amsterdam Wins 2007 BE Award

The Physical Planning Department of the city of Amsterdam has won a 2007 BE Award in the "Geospatial Government" category for its IJburg project. Covering approximately 420 hectares of recently reclaimed land, IJburg is the first integrated and sustainable urban development project of this size to be built in an environmentally sensitive area. Once completed, this multibillion euro project will increase Amsterdam's housing capacity by 6 percent.

The project includes the design and construction of 18,000 houses as well as apartments, schools, and offices. Together with extensive new beaches, these new facilities will provide shelter for, and support the education, employment, and leisure activities of, 45,000 inhabitants. Work on the site began in 1996 and should be completed by 2020.

The new urban area, which is formed from six artificial islands in the former Lake IJssel, requires a light-rail connection to Amsterdam, roads, bridges, water and sewer systems, utilities, and sports and leisure areas. There will be some 80 bridges over and in between the islands and also connecting IJburg with the city of Amsterdam.

Arjan Molenaar, project coordinator for Amsterdam's Physicial Planning Department, said, "The Bentley portfolio of solutions allows us to use collaborative workflows for land mapping, urban development, infrastructure design, road and rail track design, and much more to design IJburg's new infrastructure and to model the cityscape in 3D for planning purposes. The breadth of Bentley's solutions for local government has allowed us to standardize citywide on Bentley geospatial and civil engineering technology."

Molenaar added, "Within this integrated environment, our design team can easily exchange information with governmental departments inside and outside of Amsterdam as well as with companies in the Netherlands and abroad. Once created, the information is reused many times and can be exported in multiple file types, such as DWG, JPEG, and PDF, to support all members of the project teams as well as third-party suppliers - even those not standardized on Bentley software."

Bentley solutions being deployed include MicroStation, MicroStation GeoGraphics, Bentley Rail Track, ProjectWise InterPlot, and RoPlan (a land development and management solution specially created for municipalities in the Netherlands). MicroStation 3D functions are being used for the visualization of the new urban skyline in the existing landscape, animation of solar lighting, and visualization of new public areas.

A major challenge of the IJburg project is its location; it is situated in one of the most densely populated areas of the Netherlands and has a complex network of roads, canals, and air corridors. Designs must consider safety aspects such as minimum pass-height of bridges, flooding risks, and the height of buildings on the approach paths to Schipol airport. In addition, the project is in a government-protected European bird-migration zone that cannot be disturbed.

Molenaar concluded, "Bentley provides a software portfolio that is allowing us to execute our project strategy exactly as any municipality would hope to do: in an integrated manner, making the most of collaborative workflows, within time constraints and cost budgets, and with a high quality result."

For more details about the city of Amsterdam's winning project and all of the other 2007 BE Award projects, visit http://www.be.org/awards . For more details about the Bentley products and solutions used in this project, visit http://www.bentley.com/Geospatial . For more information on IJburg, visit http://www.ijburg.nl/ .

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