Visualizing Rezoning in Charlottesville

Since the city and consultants first introduced the Future Land Use Map in 2021, right up until the most recent pop-ups held by consultants and NDS on the Draft Zoning Ordinance (DZO), residents have asked for visualizations of what actual Charlottesville streetscapes could look like under the new regulations. Neither the city nor its consultants have obliged. We believe that while visualizations do not function as arguments for or against the DZO, they are an indispensable tool for residents trying to form an opinion on various aspects of the proposal.

We have therefore prepared several simulated visualizations of specific blocks in Charlottesville — both to provide the tools that residents asked for and didn’t get and to show that there was no difficulty involved in preparing visualizations that should have prevented a willing consultant or NDS department from providing them. You can find the videos below. We anticipate that we will add more over time.

Please bear in mind that the purpose of the videos is to help give viewers a concrete sense of height, massing and coverage. These are not architectural renderings or surveys and are necessarily approximate. We do not suggest that the generic 3D models we used are predictive of the architectural styles developers would use or that the blocks we simulate are more likely than others to be redeveloped.

If you have an area for which you’d like to see a visualization, please reach out to us via email.

Our introductory video on Visualizing Rezoning (source link)

Meade Avenue and Chesapeake Street near Meade Park (source link)

Cherry Avenue near Shamrock (source link)

Alderman Road near Ivy Rd ( source link)

Dairy Rd (source link)

Greenbrier just off Rio ( source link)

Locust Ave (900 Block, source link)

Barracks Road at Buckingham (source link)

Corner of Calhoun St and Locust Ave (source link)

Using a slightly different technique (involving pulling underlying Google Maps 3D spatial data), we can do flyover visualizations for areas that had too much foliage for our typical approach to work. Here is Barracks Rd, just southeast of Emmett St. Source link

Using the same approach, we do a visualization of the intersection of Barracks and Rugby. Source link.

Preston Avenue just south of Rugby has been designated R-C and RX-3 (depending on the side of the road). Again, the foliage and terrain required us to use our alternative technique, which produces only limited fly-over visualizations. Source link.