What URBANMIND can and can't do

As of 4 November 2026. Made from one list, with the home page and llms.txt.

URBANMIND is a free web tool for testing development on real sites in Victoria, Australia. You find a site, fill it with buildings, check the design against the planning rules, and score it with 25 analysis models. Its results are indicative: a pre-check for planners, developers and designers, not a planning decision.

Without an account you can draw sites, pick development types, use Fill, see quick figures, and run the Check and the quick analyses on one scenario kept for 7 days. Saving, all the analysis models, drone captures and API keys need an account, which is by approval during early access.

Find a site

Search for an address or place, click a lot to make it the site with its Vicmap boundary, or draw a polygon.

Address and place search in the header (Ctrl or Cmd + K).
The Lot tool makes one lot, or several touching lots, into a site with its boundary from Vicmap. The Polygon tool draws any outline.
Each site gets one of nine development types, which set its targets and its mix of buildings. You can also describe sites in words, and AI drafts them as squares of the area you ask for.
Data layers on the map: zones, overlays, parcels, transport, Census and more, with public ArcGIS services you can browse.

Fill a site with buildings

Fill lays out buildings, lots, driveways, paths, fences, gardens and trees from the development type, sized to the zone's limits and around what's already drawn.

Lays buildings out from the development type's mix, sizes each home to the zone's limits, and faces lots onto the streets you've drawn.
Works for houses, townhouses and apartment buildings. You choose the building types, your own library's houses, and fences.
A live yield bar shows homes, floor area, floor area ratio, site coverage and car spaces as you edit.
You can edit, move or remove any building, and draw streets, parking, gardens and other site elements yourself.
Each site shows what's there now and what its design would change: Existing − Lost + New = Total, with the method and sources in the Guide.
Sites with streets can get a concept layout of stormwater pits and pipes and of the gravity sewer.

Screen a whole council for where homes could go

Across a council or an area you draw, read lot by lot: how suitable each lot is, how many homes the current zones could hold, and where a target would go. A first screen, not a housing capacity assessment.

Two scores for each lot, normalised and binary, with each factor shown, weights you set, and how far the top lots move when the weights change.
Walks along the streets to stations, trams, centres and shops. What isn't known stays unknown.
Capacity from the zone and its limits, less what's there, checked against what Fill places on real lots.
Allocate a Plan for Victoria target, a Victoria in Future projection or your own total: most suitable lots first, never over capacity, and any shortfall reported.
Totals by zone and SA2, downloads by lot in EPSG:4326, and a scenario from any lots.

Check a design against the rules (Clauses 55, 57 and 58)

The Check measures a design against the zone and council schedule, Building Regulations Part 5, Clauses 55, 57 and 58, Clause 52.06 car parking and DDO heights, and lists the permits it's likely to need.

Zone use tables, council schedule limits and Building Regulations Part 5.
Clause 55 for up to 3 storeys, Clause 57 for 4 to 6 storeys and Clause 58 for apartments, as the zone decides. It measures setbacks, walls on boundaries, site coverage, canopy, communal open space and its sun, overlooking and overshadowing, among others. Some neighbour standards use estimates, and the finding says so.
Inside each dwelling, under Clauses 57 and 58: room sizes, room depth, windows, ventilation, storage and private open space, from generated or edited units or an uploaded model's rooms.
Clause 52.06 car parking, Design and Development Overlay heights, and constraints around the site such as flooding, contamination, traffic and native vegetation.
Each finding gives the measured value, the limit, the clause and whether the rule is mandatory or discretionary. It also lists the permits likely needed and the approval routes.
In the City of Melbourne it uses the City's measured building heights and council trees with their protection zones.
Results go out as a PDF, a compliance statement in Markdown, or a read-only link.

Units: floor plans in apartment buildings, generated and editable

Apartment and mixed-use buildings drawn or filled in the app get generated floor plans: a core, a corridor, and studios and 1 to 3 bedroom units with rooms, doors, windows and balconies. A planner can edit a unit's inside or bring in a plan.

Generated, not designed: it shows what fits and how it fares against the rules, so you can test a building's size and mix before an architect draws it.
The default mix comes from the City of Melbourne's completed developments. You can change the mix, the corridor and each unit's type.
Edit a unit's plan in the browser (walls, doors, windows, room names, bathroom fixtures), checked as you go and applied to that unit on every residential floor. Its outer walls stay fixed.
Bring in an openPlan3D project or an Apple RoomPlan scan, to a unit or a whole building.
Download a floor as an A3 PDF to scale, a DXF in MGA2020 metres or an SVG; the site report adds a typical floor.
For each home: hours of direct sun on the living room and balcony and how far it looks out, from its own floor, against the buildings around. Trees and slopes aren't counted.
Walk through a home in the browser, on any of its floors, with the buildings around as plain shapes and the sun at a chosen day and time. It shows space and light, not finishes.
Furnished plans, and sales sheets for each home as an A4 PDF or a link with no sign-in, with your branding. No prices.
Illustrative pictures of a room or the building, made by an AI image model from a view of the design (signed in, 20 a month). Labelled in the image, and nothing in them is measured: the model invents materials, façades and views, and can change small things.
The Check measures Clauses 57 and 58's inside standards on these rooms, including accessibility where a plan has doors, and there's a dwelling schedule.
Houses and townhouses don't get units: Clause 55 doesn't check rooms.

Import your own design (IFC, SketchUp, Rhino, DXF)

Upload IFC, DXF, Rhino .3dm, glTF, COLLADA, OBJ or GeoJSON onto a site, or send a SketchUp or Blender model through its connector.

IFC from Revit, ArchiCAD and other tools, including rooms for the inside-the-building checks.
DXF from AutoCAD and other CAD tools: closed polylines become buildings.
Rhino 6 or later (.3dm): solids, extrusions, meshes and closed flat curves.
SketchUp through its extension, or exported as glTF, COLLADA or OBJ. Blender through its add-on, or as glTF or OBJ.
GeoJSON footprints from QGIS or ArcGIS.
Files that can't be read directly: Revit .rvt (export IFC), SketchUp .skp (export a 3D format or use the extension), DWG (save as DXF) and Shapefiles (export GeoJSON).

Design on a drone capture or the City of Melbourne's capture

Upload a point cloud of the site (LAS, LAZ, E57 or PLY, up to 2 GB), or use the City of Melbourne's 2018 capture, and see the design on it. The Check and pipe designs measure from it.

The server puts a capture on MGA2020 with AHD heights and crops it to the site plus 50 m.
The Check and the pipe designs use its ground levels, neighbours' heights and existing trees.
Inside the City of Melbourne you can use the City's May 2018 photogrammetry capture (7.5 cm, about 25 cm accuracy). Anything built since isn't in it.
A capture in a local grid with no coordinate system can't be placed yet.

Schemes and comparison

Keep up to 8 schemes on a site and compare them side by side, or compare up to 4 scenarios on linked maps.

Fill can lay out several options for a site side by side, each with its plan and numbers. Keep them as schemes and switch between them.
Compare up to 4 scenarios by swipe, side by side or in a 2 by 2 grid. Comparison needs at least 2 scenarios, and the grid at least 3.
A presentation mode steps through a site's schemes.

25 analysis models

Score a scenario with 25 models across six themes: economic, environmental, transport and access, urban form, composite, and climate and government. Each states its method, inputs, data sources and limits.

Each result has a status: Checked, Estimate (rests on stated assumptions), Not measured here, or Not yet checked (an earlier version, or out of date because the drawing changed).
Urban Heat and UHI Project Impact are measured only within 9 km by 9 km around the Melbourne CBD.
Data includes the ABS Census 2021, Vicmap, PTV timetables, Overture Maps and the Atlas of Living Australia.

Site plan and exports

Download a scaled site plan (PDF, DXF), a site report (PDF), each model's result (PDF, Excel), a BIM model (IFC) and the scenario (GeoJSON).

Site plan: an A3 PDF at a standard scale, or a DXF in MGA2020 metres with a layer per kind. It's a concept plan for discussion, not a survey, title or construction drawing.
Site report: one PDF of the models with a status of Checked or Estimate, with their sources and optional AI explanations, labelled as AI.
BIM model: an IFC4 model of a site's saved buildings, placed on the map grid, with walls, floors, roofs, a front door and windows.
Each model's result as PDF or Excel, and a scenario's sites as GeoJSON.
A share link opens a read-only view of a scenario and its results.

Connectors: MCP server, REST API, SketchUp and Blender

An MCP server at /api/mcp and a REST API, both with an API key; an extension for SketchUp and an add-on for Blender that send a model, check it and bring the site back; and webhooks.

MCP server for AI assistants, over Streamable HTTP, with 32 tools. Guides for Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor and VS Code are under Settings → Connect your tools.
REST API with API keys: new keys get 100 requests an hour. The OpenAPI description is public at /openapi.json.
SketchUp extension (2021 or later) and Blender add-on (4.2 or later): send a model to a site, get the lot, neighbours and envelope back, and re-check on each save.
Webhooks for scenario and analysis events.
An AI assistant inside the app uses most of the same tools: it can answer questions from the data, run models and Fill a site. Each answer's figures come from the tool cards it shows.

What isn't done

Overlays beyond DDO heights. The Check gives every overlay on a site a line with what to do next, and lists what it did and didn't cover, and measures the numbers stated plainly in Design and Development Overlay schedules: height, setbacks, coverage, storeys and front fences. Most schedules' numbers depend on location or conditions, so those are for you to read, and it links to each one.
Accessibility inside dwellings, in part. The accessibility standards (Clause 57 E3-11, Clause 58 D18) are measured on generated, edited and brought-in plans from their doors, paths and bathroom layouts: Table D7's Design A only, not Design B, its 900 mm door path or door swings. IFC models give door widths, but rarely bathroom fixtures, so there it usually stays to be confirmed.
Design matters Clauses 57 and 58 leave to judgement. Urban context, safety, noise, wind and detailed design aren't measured: they're for the application's design response.
Structural and services design. No structural design and no building services. The only servicing is the concept layout of site stormwater and sewer. Generated units place a core and stairs as an indication: it isn't a building-code check.
Construction drawings. Outputs are concept plans and models for testing and discussion. There's no construction documentation, and the app isn't a replacement for an architect, surveyor or planner.
Places outside Victoria. The rules and data are for Victoria, Australia. Some data covers less: the City's heights, trees and capture only in the City of Melbourne, and the heat model only around the CBD.
A Revit add-in, and GIS formats beyond GeoJSON. There's no Revit add-in yet: export IFC and upload it. Sites and results go out as GeoJSON, not GeoPackage.
Live multi-user editing. Scenarios have comments, version history and read-only sharing, but several people can't edit one together live.

See it working on a real site: the worked example.

Sources

What	Source	Licence
Planning rules	Victoria Planning Provisions and council planning schemes	© State of Victoria
Building rules	Building Regulations 2018	© State of Victoria
Parcels, zones and overlays	Vicmap, Department of Transport and Planning	CC BY 4.0
Census	ABS Census 2021	CC BY 4.0
City of Melbourne capture, heights, trees and the unit mix	City of Melbourne open data	CC BY
This list	The app's knowledge hub and its code, checked on the date above	—