A city you can hold in your hands

urban:EXPORT

I thought a 3D model of a city required a team of engineers and strong coffee. Then I found a free site, with no registration, that did it in about half a minute.

urban:EXPORT concept illustration: hands holding a generic miniature city.

Illustration: AI

Choose a place on the map, mark a square, and after a few seconds you have a little city: buildings at roughly their real heights, roads, trees and even hills. I tried three places: the Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Azrieli towers in Tel Aviv, and the Bahá'í Gardens in Haifa.

Let's pick a little city

Open urban:EXPORT, search for a place and select a suggestion. Don't just press Enter: during my test that took me to Tbilisi. Beautiful, but not what I was looking for.

Mark the area you want and let the site build the model. You can export to several programs, including STL for 3D printing. In other words, you could print the Azrieli towers and put them next to the plant you haven't managed to kill yet.

urban:EXPORT concept illustration: a 3D printer printing a generic miniature city.

Illustration: AI

What's less lovely?

The buildings are simplified boxes based on OpenStreetMap data. In the Azrieli model I found a narrow column that I'm not sure exists. The limit I encountered was three areas per day.

Noa's verdict

A warm recommendation. A free tool that's more impressive than it needs to be. Not for engineering precision, but a lovely way to play and learn.

Credits for the tool and its data: urban:EXPORT by IL DARK; map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), elevation Mapterhorn / Copernicus DEM, map Esri.

In Hebrew: העיר שאפשר להחזיק ביד

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