From documents to data

In this new RTPI-authored piece for the VU.CITY Impact Report, David Mountain, Research Manager at the Royal Town Planning Institute, examines one of the most important questions facing planning today: How can the system move from documents to data without losing the trust, scrutiny and accountability that good governance depends on?

The planning system operates at the intersection of two worlds, one fast-moving and one much slower.

Administrative data is an area of huge interest for some of the world's biggest technology companies. Construction and building remain largely local, craft-like manufacturing processes. The current wave of local government reorganisation and the emergence of Spatial Development Strategies may be a once-in-50-year opportunity to lay the groundwork for modernising this interface, with consequences for the efficiency and quality of built environment outcomes.

Concepts from town planning have become metaphorical reference points for software development. "Brownfield development" refers to coding within an established software environment; "greenfield" to building new services, applications or data environments from the bottom up. Startups tend to do greenfield development, whereas established software companies work in brownfield environments. AI-assisted coding can work well in the former situation. In brownfield environments, it is important to have a detailed understanding of the existing code framework.

Since the 1960s, town planning processes have themselves been supported by computer software, initially in transport modelling, and with Geographical Information Systems and other electronic databases since the 1980s. Over the last two decades, global conversations around smart cities and the role of data analytics in urban governance have developed as an extension of the earlier cybernetic ambition for smart, adaptive processes at the city scale. In 2016, the Connected Places Catapult, then Future Cities Catapult, launched its Future of Planning programme. Following this, the Digital Task Force for Planning was set up and published A Digital Future for Planning in 2022. In recent years, the government's PropTech Innovation Fund and Ordnance Survey's Geovation programme have helped create a new cohort of startups concerned with improving and rebuilding town planning in England.¹ ²

"Planning's currency remains the document: version-controlled, signed off, dated, delivered."

Over the past year I have attended and spoken at a number of plantech and digital planning events. There are two common claims within this community, both reflected in recent discussion around MHCLG's digital planning work and the Connected Places Catapult's work on the future of planning.³ The first is that the "legacy" technology providers, or incumbents, have stopped innovating. As first-movers, it is said that they have become complacent to the dynamic needs of their clients.

As consumers, we have had two decades of familiarisation with the potential of real-time data manipulation, enabled by cloud computing interfaces and powered by data centres. In contrast to the personal consumer market, corporate IT has been relatively conservative. More recently, however, we have seen a rapid shift from enterprise servers to cloud computing, and from perpetual software licensing to subscription-based software-as-a-service.

There are huge advantages to this parallel physical distancing of our data from the workplace and into the cloud, and the decommodification, for lack of a better term, of the software on which it is created and manipulated. It creates convenience and saves costs: no server rooms in every small business, access to documents from various devices, real-time collaboration, big data analysis and artificial intelligence.

There are concerns, however, as well. Under older systems of corporate IT, there was a more direct relationship between investment in software purchasing and the skills and training required to use it, with the data itself staying in-house.

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Under the cloud/SaaS system, the data itself is often collected and stored by a third-party organisation, operating at scale. Moreover, the skills to interpret and manipulate it are subcontracted to those with different domain knowledge, divorcing different parts of the workflow between entities. As startup products are so often proprietary, the data itself can become increasingly difficult for the client, for example a local authority, to maintain meaningful ownership over.

The concerning result of this is the gradual, quiet privatisation of public data into "black boxes." In the governance sector, long-term provenance, scrutiny and audit of documents, records and evidence is crucial for democracy, even long into the future. While innovation in planning technology is undoubtedly positive, the risk of further subcontracting and vendor lock-in is far from resolved by a pivot away from legacy providers, and may be worsened, especially given further budgetary constraints.

A second refrain encapsulates the radical idealism of the plantech community: "from documents to data." Planning's currency remains the document: version-controlled, signed off, dated, delivered. This is common for critical machineries of governance and finance processing, both corporate and state: auditing, invoicing, parliamentary statute and jurisprudence, to list but a few. This long-established professional culture of time-based documentation is a crucial part of the assignation of professional responsibility and intellectual property.

Professionalism's document-oriented ontology is, of course, slow. It is tempting to think that this causes the sluggishness and expensiveness of housing and infrastructure delivery, and that a post-documentary, real-time, platform-based governance would expedite land-use dynamism. But it needs to happen carefully, built on trusted, secure, interoperable administrative data infrastructure, which can withstand dishonest or hostile tampering and be subject to independent scrutiny. The potential of blockchain cryptography for permanently hosting trusted administrative data has yet to be fully understood.

The other set of issues concern the institutional inertia which comes with complexity. New unitary authorities can take many years to integrate the IT systems of their former constituent authorities. Often local authorities are locked into single integrated IT providers at a corporate level, limiting the ability for particular services, including planning, to experiment. Poor integration also creates greater vulnerability from the point of view of cybersecurity. These disparate issues mean that the choice to defer system-change in favour of incremental reform is often the easiest and least controversial option.

If we take the greenfield/brownfield metaphor to its extreme, we see the startup perspective on the town planning system as a whole — policy, practice, institutions, data and processes — as like a huge, metropolitan-scale brownfield site, inherited and moulded through countless precedents of layered compromises, restructures and failed attempts at comprehensive reform.

In policy terms, there is an immediate window of opportunity. The roll-out of Spatial Development Strategies at the new sub-regional level by new Strategic Authorities has the potential to be a moment of leverage for new approaches to data to be embedded. Lots of stakeholders are currently looking for best practice guidance. Leadership on new best practices needs to emerge, whether from the top down, or if necessary, out of the initiatives of the new authorities themselves.⁴

References

¹ Future Cities Catapult, Future of Planning: State of the Art Innovations in Digital Planning, December 2016.
² Michael Batty and Wei Yang, A Digital Future for Planning: Spatial Planning Reimagined, Digital Task Force for Planning, February 2022.
³ Joey Gardiner, "Why the government drive to digitise planning is yet to make a meaningful impact on services," Planning Resource, 7 November 2025. Accessed 28 April 2026.
⁴ Bin Guan et al., Rethinking Planning for Growth & Infrastructure Delivery: Digital, Integrated and Strategic Pathways for Spatial Development Strategies, Connected Places Catapult, May 2026. Read the full report (PDF download)