How this works

The 3D scene above is built directly from the Geocoded National Address File (GNAF). Every dwelling in Australia has a GNAF ID with a birth date. When a 280-unit tower is built, 280 GNAF IDs appear on the same coordinate, often in the same week. Group them by location, count them, and you can infer the building's size, archetype, and the year it appeared. That is what you are scrubbing through.

What is true

The locations are real. Every building you see sits at the exact latitude and longitude of its addresses in the official GNAF register. The dwelling counts are real. A building shown as 280 dwellings has 280 real GNAF IDs at that coordinate. The first-seen year is real. That is the earliest date_created across the addresses at that point.

What is approximate

The heights are inferred. We do not have OSM heights for every building, so the height is a function of the dwelling count: a 344-unit building becomes a 147 m tower, a 5-unit cluster becomes a 9 m townhouse. The Era Tower (165 m) and The Spire (130 m) calibrate the upper end. The footprints are simplified to circles. Real building polygons live in a sibling project. Here the focus is on time, height, and silhouette. Pre-2010 first-seen dates are GNAF backfill. Most of the established Chatswood stock lit up between 2004 and 2008 when the GNAF database first ingested historical addresses. Anything earlier than 2010 is treated as baseline. Real new construction lights up year by year from there.

Why this is the right visualisation

This is a base. Forecast supply, planning controls, and per-lot detail come from separate Microburbs research projects. For now, this is what is true, and what is pretty.