Wei Yang OBE is the CEO of Digital Task Force for Planning and an internationally renowned town planner and urban designer who champions a place-based, whole-systems approach to tackle the grand challenges of our times.
The opportunity in digital planning, Wei Yang argues, is bigger than most people appreciate, and the barrier is more specific than most people admit.
The opportunity is methodological. Data-enabled workflows can allow organisations to test scenarios earlier, see trade-offs more clearly, and bring together environmental, infrastructure, and viability evidence in ways that genuinely weren’t possible before. “It’s a methodological change,” she says, one that improves not just the speed of decisions, but the quality of the plans themselves.
The barrier is fragmentation. Not of technology, but of the things technology depends on: shared data standards, institutional capacity, and the leadership to invest in both. “Technology is advancing rapidly,” Yang observes, “but without shared standards and investment in capability, digital tools risk adding complexity rather than clarity.”
On the question of whether digital tools build public trust in decision-making processes - or undermine it - Yang is direct. The answer depends entirely on how those tools are designed and deployed.
Digital systems don’t automatically build trust. They have to be designed to do so. Communities need to be able to see what evidence is being used, understand how trade-offs are being made, and know where professional judgement sits. If the data is opaque, the interface is inaccessible, or engagement happens only in formats that exclude people, technology hasn’t solved the problem, it’s moved it.
“Access to data is not the same as participation,” she says. The goal is digital tools that make processes more consistent, more accessible, and ultimately more trusted. That requires transparency built into the system from the start, not added as an afterthought.
On standards, what good digital spatial infrastructure looks like and who is responsible for building it, Yang is clear that leadership has to be shared but coordinated. Government sets standards and national data infrastructure. Research and professional bodies maintain ethical and competency frameworks. Industry supports implementation. Academia equips the next generation with the skills and critical perspective to use these tools well.
But what ties it together, she argues, is culture. “We must foster a shared culture of innovation for the public good.” Not innovation as a destination. Innovation in service of better outcomes for the people and places decisions affect.
In five years, Yang would like to see spatial data - high quality, real time, and genuinely accessible - at the centre of how organisations make and communicate decisions. More than that, she’d like to see a cultural shift: from reactive, case-by-case decision-making to proactive, evidence-led strategy. Faster, yes. But more coherently, more transparently, and more trusted by the people those decisions are made for.