Turning global urban projects into searchable design intelligence
A visual research platform that helps architects, planners, and city-makers discover, compare, measure, and save real-world urban design references.
The story
Overview
Urbanitarian is a curated urban-design reference platform built around real projects from cities around the world. NexTay Solutions helped create a research experience where architects, planners, researchers, and city-makers can move from visual discovery to detailed project analysis without jumping between disconnected sources.
The challenge
Urban-design research is often spread across publications, office archives, maps, project websites, and personal reference folders, making useful precedent difficult and time-consuming to compare.
Urbanitarian needed to turn a large and growing collection of masterplans, streetscapes, and urbanscapes into a structured research product that still felt visual, intuitive, and easy to explore.
- Organize different urban project types within one consistent data model.
- Make hundreds of visual references quickly searchable through meaningful filters.
- Combine project imagery, maps, technical data, descriptions, authorship, and sources.
- Support comparison, bookmarking, collections, and collaborative research workflows.
What we built
We built the experience around the way design research naturally happens: discover a reference visually, narrow the database with filters, inspect the project in depth, compare its data and context, then save useful references for later. Grid and map views make exploration flexible, while detailed project pages connect visual material with structured urban-design information.
Structured discovery
Search, tags, size, status, author, country, city, grid, and map views help users quickly narrow a large reference library to relevant projects.
Deep project research
Project pages bring together imagery, plans, maps, project data, technical details, related streetscapes and urbanscapes, and original sources.
Reusable research
Bookmarks and collections let users turn one-time browsing into an organized reference library that can be revisited and shared with a team.
The outcome
Urbanitarian now provides a unified research environment for hundreds of global urban-design references, helping users move faster from inspiration to informed design decisions.
Instead of researching urban precedent across disconnected sources, users can discover, compare, analyze, and collect projects inside one purpose-built platform.
