PlanTech — A new market for digital planning products and services

Stefan Webb is Director of Digitising Planning at Future Cities Catapult.

In this month’s blog, alongside Natwest, we hear insight and comment from Stefan to help us understand all things PlanTech.

The land use planning system — how cities allocate land for development, develop policies for the kind of development cities want and assess applications for development against those policies and allocations — is broken. Or at least that is what many people think. In the media and in political debate, the planning system is often the first to be fingered as the source of problems ranging poor urban design, citizens opposing new development and lack of affordable housing.

Yet the planning system is central to shaping the places we live; the amount of green space we have access to; the types of jobs that are available; the affordability of housing; the accessibility and capacity of new schools; and much, much more.

However when you look at way in which the planning system operates, there is no truer representation of the Madilyn Albright observation that we are using 19th Century governance and 20th Century tools to solve 21st Century challenges. Observe many planning departments and you will still see planners use scale rulers to review printed drawings to determine whether developments conform to minimum space standards. Look at any local authority website and you will struggle to find a clear representation of how that place is expected to change over the next 5, 10, 15 years. Observe any planning committee meeting and even if you can interpret the jargon, you will find it hard to understand what is going on.

These challenges were at the front of our mind when we first set up the Future of Planning programme in late 2016. However, these were just hunches that we needed to explore. This led us to conduct user research with planners, property developers, architects, citizen groups, utility companies and many others who are involved in the planning system across England (in London, Manchester and Plymouth). This user research flagged four areas where the planning system is in need of transformation — how plans are made; the planning application service; how planning is communicated; and the use of data within the system. It is the use (or mis-use) of data that offers the most opportunities to start ups who may not have considered developing products and services for the planning sector.

“We are using 19th Century governance and 20th Century tools to solve 21st Century challenges”

Why Cities Need to Unlock Their Planning Data

Big data, Artificial Intelligence, and visualisation are transforming the way that people process and interpret information. But the methods used by cities to plan new developments creak with age and smack of desperate inefficiency. It’s time that those systems caught up with the modern world.

The processes in place within city authorities to gather information about sites, compare proposals from developers, and engage with citizens are certainly rigorous, and produce huge quantitates of data at no small expense. If you’re sufficiently determined, you can find it in the appendices of local plans — and those brave enough to bother will discover reams of data, pages of tables, and an atlas-worth of maps. But as well as finding it difficult to understand, they’ll also see that it’s locked up inside PDFs that are impossible to search or analyse.

Comparatively, the cost of generating data in the planning system is sunk when it’s dumped into a series of analogue reports and planning applications. Not only do local planning authorities have to commission new studies, time after time, to obtain the same evidence, but because it’s stored away in a PDF it can’t easily be used to inform other services.

What’s needed, then, is for cities to hold their spatially relevant data in one place, where it can be used over and over again, not just for multiple plans but across departments. Such a system would not just provide efficiency savings by reducing the cost of updating the evidence base for local plans, but also ensure that everyone is working with the same figures and assumptions, and make it easier to build tools to access, interpret, and analyse the data.

Such a system will allow local authorities to maximise the value of the data that is generated as part of the planning process. In turn, it will reduce the time it takes to produce local plans and make them more transparent and understandable to citizens and developers. The data is there to be used — cities just need to modernise a little to make use of it.

PlanTech — A data-driven and digitally-enabled planning system fit for the 21st Century

We call the new market of start-ups, products and services PlanTech. Even in 2016 there were a small number of pioneers who saw the opportunity to disrupt the way in which things were working; things are now moving even faster. Land Insight focus on the ‘site appraisal’ part of the planning system; how developers locate land suitable for development and have grown rapidly in the last three years. Built ID are developing pioneering new ways of engaging local people with new developments, having started focusing on existing developments. Open Systems Labs are looking to re-design and automate how you apply for a planning application.

Whilst the market is beginning to move, critically central government also realises it has an important part to play. The Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government now have a digital directorate that is beginning to fix the data that is required in the planning system by making it open and machine readable, for others to build products and services on. Local authorities such as the London Borough of Hackney are beginning to re-design their planning services and the Greater London Authority are looking at an open 3D model of London.

As these building blocks begin to fall into place, we envisage a much more open and interoperable digital planning market emerging, with software applications replacing costly consultant reports; emerging technologies such as augmented reality enabling visualisation of planned developments; and machine learning helping planners and developers better understand where to locate new housing, offices and communities.

Find out more about the Future Cities Catapult’s Future of Planning Programme here.

Special thank you to Stefan Webb, Director of Digitising Planning at Future Cities Catapult.