PlaceBuilder - the insight-driven community engagement platform to move smart cities forwards, together

About

PlaceBuilder is an insight-driven community engagement platform that inspires users, and utilises advanced analytics to model solutions for city planners, instantly, to close the feedback loop. The demand for new infrastructure is growing at its fastest rate in 50 years. While the majority of people agree we need new infrastructure, public opposition stops new housing, transport and urban realm changes that we urgently need. People feel completely locked out of the planning system; if they try to engage, they feel their voices haven’t been heard. In the UK it’s costing us £42bn lost GDP. With the growth of smart city implementation, citizens are at risk of feeling increasingly locked out of complex, data-driven decisions, creating a major and increasing public acceptability risk to delivery. Our groundbreaking engagement platform, PlaceBuilder, for the first time makes it easy for anyone to engage deeply in planning issues, in just 5 minutes. With our world class spatial and language analytics, planners can instantly spot opportunities and consensus, and potential deliverable solutions. With data and API integrations, PlaceBuilder can support a huge range of innovative data solutions, enabling vast global potential in smart city data insight and delivery. By using our platform across an area of 8000 homes, Lewisham Council was able to double the number of ambitious planning interventions they could implement that they normally could. This has helped the client achieve much stronger benefits for their residents with the available funding, particularly important in the Covid era. Our clients include Scottish Government (national scale), Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government (region of 3m homes, seeking to intensify by 2050), Glasgow (city wide), local authorities and masterplanners. We are embarking on our growth phase to get to product market fit, and are bringing on strategic data partners to train our models and demonstrate performance at major scale. "Thank you for doing this. This has been the best consultation format I've encountered." - Consultee, Lewisham "PlaceBuilder made it easier for us to incorporate community feedback into designs. This is vital to build trust and show we’re listening, and meant we could improve the neighbourhood in the way our communities wanted." Client, Josh Learner, Lewisham Council "Placebuilder is a key aspect of our commitment to better engagement and increasing civic participation in planning, as highlighted in the recent publication of 'Transforming Places Together - Scotland's Digital Strategy for Scotland', 2020 " - Liz Pringle, Head of Digital Planning for the Scottish Government. https://www.thefuturefox.com/news

Key Benefits

Record breaking engagement: we tripled the leading competitor's engagement rate, and achieve 22-28% conversion rate (% users submitting responses) - leading to high cost effectiveness for clients, and demonstrating just how popular our platform is with citizens. Clients can see what solutions they can build down to a granular level - and unlock faster smart city delivery in collaboration with their citizens. This will help accelerate responsible.computing globally. PlaceBuilder spans the three fields - infrastructure, data usage and impact. We can work with you to place citizens at the heart of the responsible.computing venture. With newly secured seed funding, our growth plan includes forging strategic partnerships to grow our access to data to test our solution across cities, at scale, and further train our ML models for deeper, actionable and international insight and infrastructure acceleration. We've proven results in partnership with engineering and data specialists like STFC, have an ambitious 2-year R&D roadmap, and would be thrilled to collaborate with IBM and members of the partner ecosystem to create global impact with citizens at the fore.

Applications

Spatial planning Smart city public realm technology rollout Cross-departmental /partner insight

Register for free for full unlimited access to all innovation profiles on LEO

  • Discover articles from some of the world’s brightest minds, or share your thoughts and add one yourself
  • Connect with like-minded individuals and forge valuable relationships and collaboration partners
  • Innovate together, promote your expertise, or showcase your innovations