📡 Data & IoT

3D City Model & Geoportal

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.

Live 📅 since 2009 ◆ Source-checked

🤖 AI-generated summary of the sources below — how this works · 🔎 Last verified 2026-08-04

📡 Data & IoT Digital twin Open data

🎓 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.

Evidence• No measured figure

Scale🏙️ City-wide

FundingCity of Frankfurt am Main

📖 Terms in this entry: Digital twin · GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) · Microgrid

Sources

↗ Stadt Frankfurt am Main — 3D-Stadtmodell (authority)Official page of the Stadtvermessungsamt: complete LoD1 and LoD2 coverage since 2009; annual LoD2 update (third quarter) since 2019 in CityGML, derived from the digital terrain model and the annual aerial survey; browser-based 3D portal built on virtualcitySYSTEMS' virtualcityMAP; data supplied as CityGML, 3DXF or Shape3D. (frankfurt.de refuses automated fetches; verified through search indexing of the page.)

↗ Stadt Frankfurt am Main — Digitales Geländemodell (authority)Official page: the fourth citywide airborne laser scan was flown in March 2020 at a point density of eight points per square metre, with heights determined to about 15 cm.

↗ Geoportal Frankfurt (authority)The public geoportal itself, which hosts the map applications including the solar-potential tool at geoportal.frankfurt.de/solarpotential.

↗ Stadt Frankfurt am Main — Solar-Kataster (authority)Official page on solar potential for Frankfurt roofs; the city's own platform is built on the three-dimensional model and is therefore more detailed than a classic two-dimensional solar cadastre.

This overview was generated with AI from the public sources listed above 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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Compare this project

🇩🇪 Automated Street Condition Scanning · Frankfurt am Main Two ways the city records its own fabric: aerial scanning rebuilds the roofs each year, scan cars read the road surface. 🇫🇮 Helsinki 3D+ Open City Model · Helsinki Helsinki released its model as open data and hung a solar atlas on it; Frankfurt keeps its in a portal but rebuilds the roofs yearly. 🇩🇪 Cosma21 / [ui!] UrbanPulse Urban Data Platform · Frankfurt am Main Two municipal data assets, different halves: geometry from the surveying office, live sensor readings from the platform.

Explore the wider context

🏙️ Urban digital twins compared 🪞 Digital twin guide 🏙️ Frankfurt am Main city profile 📡 Data & IoT projects

📎 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.

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