CommunityViz began as an idea in the late 1990s when Noel Fritzinger and his friend Lyman Orton, proprietor of the Vermont Country Store and long-term member of his town’s local planning board, first envisioned a software tool that would make the planning process more accessible to ordinary citizens.

The initial team included The Environmental Simulation Center, Fore Site Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Multigen-Paradigm, and Green Mountain GeoGraphics.

The first commercial version was released in late 2001 and included three components: Scenario Constructor for interactive analysis, SiteBuilder 3D (OEMed from MultiGen-Paradigm) for 3D visualization, and Policy Simulator for agent-based modeling of future outcomes resulting from present-day policy decisions.

In 2017, development of the software was handed off to City Explained, Inc. At the 2011 Esri Business Partners Conference, Placeways received the Extension to ArcGIS Desktop award for CommunityViz.

Linking the Build-Out, Suitability and Allocator 5 tools creates a powerful and flexible urban growth modeling suite, used by cities, counties and regional governments.

CommunityViz has 3D capabilities including automatically exporting to Google Earth and creating scenes using SketchUp models and creating highly realistic, interactive 3D scenes using Scenario 3D with 3D models in common CAD and SketchUp formats (.KMZ, .3DS, and COLLADA interchange (.DAE)).

CommunityViz is used primarily for land-use planning and natural resource management, but because it allows its users to create custom analyses, it can be applied to almost any geographic decision-making process.

The largest user groups comprise government planners (local, regional, and national), private planning and design firms, and universities.