This video captures the complete presentation by Tran Ngoc Son – UrbanAna’s founder – at the event. If you couldn’t attend in person, start with this video to better understand the software development journey and see demonstrations of key features.
On April 27, 2025, at the 77th Anniversary of Vietnam Architecture Day in Khanh Hoa, the urban design software UrbanAna made an impressive debut. Architect Tran Ngoc Son – UrbanAna’s founder – personally presented the development journey of this tool to numerous architects, urban planners, and industry experts.
A Personal Beginning: Challenges from Real Practice
Opening his talk, Son expressed sincere gratitude to the Khanh Hoa Architects Association, the Young Architects Club of Khanh Hoa for facilitating the sharing session, and all attendees. With a relatable yet passionate tone, he emphasized UrbanAna’s deep origins:
“Thank you to the Khanh Hoa Architects Association for giving me the opportunity to stand here today and share with you about my journey over the past 2 years. A product development journey that I believe will change how we design and envision the cities of the future. This journey originated from the very challenges that I and many architects and planners face in our profession.”
Career journey and some real projects by Architect Tran Ngoc Son
Son shared about the long days working on various planning projects, having to deal with repetitive manual operations in AutoCAD. “I’ve spent many, very long days with AutoCAD. I had to manually offset each road boundary, fillet each curb, and manually count hatches for each land area.” This process was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors, especially when design changes were needed. “It’s a very tedious and error-prone task,” Son affirmed.
From these challenges, he asked himself: “Is there another way? Is there a way to spend less time on manual, mechanical operations and more time on creativity?” The answer, as he shared, was “Yes, and if we DARE to create it.” And UrbanAna was born from this very aspiration to liberate creativity for architects and urban planners.
UrbanAna – From Practice to Product: “Simple, Effective, and Inspiring”
UrbanAna was developed as a plugin for SketchUp, a platform already familiar to architects. This choice was made not only due to its popularity but also because of SketchUp’s intuitive, easy-to-learn nature, which is perfect for quickly sketching planning ideas. With the philosophy of “Simple, Effective, and Inspiring,” UrbanAna aims to solve three core issues: automating manual operations, calculating planning metrics in real-time, and helping users focus on design concepts.
With UrbanAna, users can:
- Draw and edit street networks flexibly, with automatically created intersections.
- Create plots and assign land use functions easily, customizing land use types according to project needs.
- Design parametric buildings, quickly change properties such as number of floors, height, or directly interact with the model.
- Monitor and calculate key planning indicators in real-time such as floor area, floor area ratio, building density, height… right on the interface.
- Convert data from CAD to UrbanAna objects, leveraging existing drawings.
- Export reports to Excel and drawings to AutoCAD to complete documentation.
Software interface + features
“UrbanAna not only helps save time but also sparks creative inspiration in work,” Son shared during his live demonstration on stage.
Attendees and Memorable Moments: Questions from Experts
One of the most memorable moments at the presentation was the Q&A session. The atmosphere suddenly became much more lively when Hung – an experienced architect – stood up to ask a question.
Hung’s question went straight to the heart of product development: “Why did you choose to develop UrbanAna on the SketchUp platform? And in the future, will the software integrate with GIS?”
The sharpness of the question and the depth of the inquiry captured everyone’s attention. Son responded enthusiastically, explaining that choosing SketchUp was a strategic decision to leverage its large user community, platform familiarity, and importantly, the ability to store data locally, ensuring project security. At the same time, the development team is also researching GIS data integration options to expand UrbanAna’s potential in advanced planning projects.
Resources and Gifts from UrbanAna
As a token of appreciation, UrbanAna offered all attendees a free 30-day license. This is an opportunity for users to experience all the software’s features and apply them to their actual work.
Additionally, to support further learning, the UrbanAna team also provided the following resources:
Installation and Usage Guide
Getting started with UrbanAna is very simple:
- SketchUp installation guide: SketchUp installation guide
- Quick start guide: Quick start guide
- Software introduction video: UrbanAna – Product Features Overview
The UrbanAna team is always with you
UrbanAna is not just a technology product but also a dedicated team, with a founder who is also an architect, always listening and improving based on community feedback. Son also shared the meaning behind the name “UrbanAna,” where “Ana” besides meaning Analysis, was also inspired by the Goddess Thien Y A Na (God. Poh Nagar), a cultural symbol from his hometown of Nha Trang.
“UrbanAna hopes to be a small but sincere part of the journey to develop urban software… I hope you will enjoy using UrbanAna as much as we enjoyed every moment developing it.”
If you have questions, suggestions, or need technical support, don’t hesitate to contact us:
👉 Website: https://urbanana.su/
📩 Email: [email protected]
📞 Whatsapp / Telegram: 0941.000.169
📘 Facebook: UrbanAna
See you in the next updates of UrbanAna – where technology accompanies urban creativity!
