There’s a genre of civic technology that treats public systems as broken markets in need of disruption. The tools are sleek, the slogans optimistic, and the funding model rarely lasts longer than a few years. Planning has become a tempting target for this mindset: slow, procedural, visibly under strain.
I’m not interested in joining that pattern.
The tools I’m building here aren’t startups in disguise. They’re not pitched at investors, optimised for exits, or designed to outpace the systems they interact with. They’re deliberately slow, modular, and open — not because of some vague commitment to transparency, but because planning systems themselves are slow, multi-actor, and procedural for reasons that are at least partly defensible.
Startups tend to work best when they can control their environment. Planning doesn’t offer that. It’s not a space of optimisation — it’s a space of negotiated judgement, bounded discretion, and accumulated institutional memory. Trying to force it into product cycles tends to flatten what makes it meaningful — and erode what makes it accountable.
That’s not to say the system doesn’t need changing. It does. But the method matters. I’m interested in working alongside existing institutions, not around them. In exposing policy slippage, not automating it. In making discretionary judgement more legible — not pretending it can be replaced.
This is also why the work is open-source. Not as a branding choice, but because the systems I’m engaging with are public — and so the tools built in relation to them should be open to inspection, adaptation, and refusal. If a planning officer, a researcher, or a civil servant can’t see how something works, it’s not trustworthy. And if it can’t be repurposed, it’s not infrastructure.
There are easier ways to build software. This isn’t one of them. But it’s the one that feels proportionate to the system it’s engaging with — and the public role that system still, however shakily, performs.