Imagine if next time you saw a plan for an oversized monster tower block proposed for your street, you could get out your smartphone and swipe left to oppose it? Or see a carefully designed scheme for a new neighbourhood library and swipe right to support it?



Tinder for urban planning might sound far-fetched, but it is already being trialled in the sun-kissed Californian city of Santa Monica. City authorities are trying to gauge public opinion on everything from street furniture and parking, to murals and market stalls for their forthcoming urban plan, using a digital tool modelled on a dating app.

CitySwipe presents local residents with images of potential scenarios and simple yes/no questions, encouraging people to swipe through the options, as if assessing prospective partners. For the time being, it’s fairly basic: a photo of some street art appears with a caption asking: “Do you want more of this?” Folding cafe tables and chairs are shown next to pink park benches, asking: “Which do you prefer?”

It might sound superficial, but the questions move on to attitudes towards walking, bike lanes, housing and beyond. It makes the consultation process effortless, compared with the usual feedback mechanisms of filling in lengthy mailed-out response forms, downloading wordy PDFs, or being accosted by a chirpy volunteer with a clipboard.

It is one of the many tech tools cropping up in the world of town planning, in a bid to make what has always been an opaque and notoriously confusing system more transparent, inclusive and efficient for the public, planners and developers alike.

Mapping Greater Manchester can be used as a planning tool for potential developments. Photograph: Greater Manchester Open Data Infrastructure Map

In the UK, the practical logistics of how planning is actually done have changed little since the system’s invention with the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. Major new developments are still announced with all the fanfare of a piece of A4 paper tied to a lamp-post, which quickly turns into a soggy mess. Residents and developers have to navigate through reams of different local and national planning policies, while time-poor planners are inundated with applications of endless binders of drawings and supporting documents that are rarely even read.

Research undertaken by the Future Cities Catapult, a government-funded organisation dedicated to exploring solutions to urban issues, has uncovered a wealth of digital innovations that could lead towards a more data-driven planning system, making proposals more transparent and outcomes more certain for all parties involved. They recently launched an open call for ideas, with funding available to develop prototype tools to make the planning process fit for the 21st-century.

“Generally planners stick to how planning has always been done,” says Stefan Webb, head of projects at the Future Cities Catapult. “They don’t necessarily think it’s that interesting or informative for other people. It’s not through malicious intent, but little thought has been given to what might be possible if the system was made more accessible to everyone.”

Webb and his team are looking into innovations that could both streamline the bureaucracy and make the whole process more transparent – from cutting down the amount of money local authorities waste on development notices in local papers and consultation letters, to getting people truly involved in shaping local plans.

Manchester is already leading the way with joined-up thinking, having developed an interactive online map to inform potential development sites across the whole city.

Startup Urban Intelligence has developed a planning platform called Howard, named after the world’s first garden city planner Ebenezer Howard.

The snappily named Greater Manchester Open Data Infrastructure Map aggregates everything from water and transport networks to property prices and brownfield land, offering a total overview of the city’s physical, social, and green infrastructure. An additional map shows proposed development plots, compiling those allocated by the council with sites suggested by residents and developers, so everyone can see what’s going on in their area. It shines a spotlight on a process that usually happens behind closed doors, making it easier for community groups to get involved.

In London, startup company Urban Intelligence has turned its attention to how the innumerable different planning policies that regulate any particular site can be made more intelligible, bringing the contents of disparate policy documents together in one place. Their interactive platform, named Howard (after Ebenezer, godfather of garden cities), collates and digitises national and neighbourhood policies, allowing you to click on a place on the map and see everything relevant in one go. It’s such a no-brainer, it seems bizarre that no one’s thought of doing it already (though at a cost of £25/month, it’s clearly aimed at the development industry).

US platform Flux Metro has taken the idea a step further and built a 3D model that integrates zoning information with financial viability algorithms, to predict the likely profitability of a scheme in any given scenario. It allows developers to visualise a site’s context and constraints, including building heights and shadows, to inform what might be possible to build.

Such a tool makes more sense in the US, where planning codes are simpler and outcomes more predictable, but similar applications could help to bring more certainty to the UK planning system, where regulations are often too vague and negotiable, leading to an inefficient and lengthy process of bargaining on a site-by-site basis. A large part of the iniquitous viability problem stems from the fact that the limits are never spelt out in black and white, so developers will always try to get away with more.

The increasing sophistication of augmented reality technology is also spawning one of the potentially most useful innovations in the planning field. As the nascent UrbanPlanAR platform, developed by Heriot-Watt University and Linknode, shows, AR could allow 3D models of new developments to be superimposed on to their real-world sites, letting local residents walk around future proposals and feel their true impact.

In Switzerland, metal frames of proposed buildings, known as baugespanne, have to be erected during the planning process to demonstrate their true bulk, but this app could make a detailed model appear with the swipe of a screen. And if you don’t like what you see? Swipe left!

But the digitisation of these processes has its critics too. By increasing access for one demographic, could it also be making the system more baffling for others? Not everyone has a smartphone, access to a computer or the digital literacy to interact with online maps. There are questions, too, over who exactly is leading – and benefitting from – the smart city revolution, as more private companies get involved. If the future of city planning is digital and data-driven, we must stay alert to where that data is going and who is profiting from it.

Oliver Wainwright will be chairing a debate on planning on 26 January at Central Saint Martins, London, as part of the Fundamentals debate series

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion, and explore our archive here