3D City Model & Geoportal
This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed below and checked against them before publication. It has not had a complete human fact-check — treat it as a starting point and follow the sources.
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Most cities build a 3D twin once and let it age. Frankfurt's surveying office re-derives its roofs every year from a fresh aerial flight — which is why a solar tool can still trust them.
what does this mean?
The strongest source is the operator's or the city's own reporting — an official report, dataset or press release. It grades who did the looking — not how well the project went. All four grades →Part of 1001 Smart Cities — 1,167 documented projects · 🏙️ 9 more in Frankfurt am Main · 🪞 Digital twin guide · 📡 Data & IoT projects
Frankfurt's surveying office has kept a complete 3D model of the city since 2009 — block geometry (LoD1) plus differentiated roof shapes (LoD2) — and, unusually for the genre, refreshes the LoD2 buildings every year from aerial imagery rather than leaving a one-off showpiece to age. Height data come from repeated airborne laser scanning, most recently a citywide flight in March 2020 at eight points per square metre. The model is browsable by anyone through the city's 3D portal, handed out as CityGML for planning work, and carries a solar-potential tool that assesses roofs in three dimensions instead of two.
🎓 Lesson
The interesting decision here is maintenance, not construction. A digital twin is easy to announce and hard to keep true, and the value of the solar-potential tool rests entirely on the roof geometry underneath it being current. Frankfurt solved that by making the refresh routine — an annual LoD2 rebuild from the aerial survey the surveying office flies anyway — rather than by procuring a bigger model.
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📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “3D City Model & Geoportal” — Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/frankfurt-3d-city-model/ (last verified 2026-08-04). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.