This is one of the Street Views I created. For this I had to do a looot of research about how things actually looked back then. Then we had to throw it over board and make everything a bit more colorful and such. I took an architectural "footprint" (a map) of the park and then created some box models of it in SketchUp. I did some kit bashing of roofs and such but for the most part the 3d was only used to get the actual dimensions in place.
In this image you can see we are next to a market place and this is the are where the visitor enters Lanzhou.