New towers, transport links and neighbourhoods are approved and built at a pace that's genuinely hard to picture, even for people who work in the city every day. Most of that change happens one planning decision at a time, which means most people never see it add up.
VU.CITY's Manchester digital twin was built to solve exactly that problem. It's a single, continuously updated 3D model of the city, covering 166.75 sq km to 15cm accuracy across 44 live data layers, from transport and land use to flood risk and green space. Architects, developers and local authorities use it every day to plan, test and present real schemes. But the same model can do something else: show, in one shot, just how much of the city has already changed.
Using VU.CITY's Timeline Tool, we took a single aerial flight across Manchester city centre which opens on the city as it stands today, then transforms mid-flight as every consented and completed scheme lights up in colour, blue for approved, yellow for completed. It's a simple way to visualise the sheer scale of development landing on Manchester.
The flight moves through three of the areas doing the most work in that story:
Pull back further and the same pattern repeats right across Greater Manchester, dozens of schemes lit up across the conurbation, not just the city centre. This is exactly the story BBC News wanted to tell in July, when Andy Burnham left the Greater Manchester mayoralty for Downing Street.
Explore the same Manchester digital twin used in the BBC News piece, and see the regeneration areas shaping "Manchesterism" for yourself.