News Alert |

The final day in England for the City of Ballarat included a visit to London’s Future Cities Catapult Centre.

This is a global centre of urban innovation excellence and describe themselves as “where cities, businesses and universities come together to develop solutions to the future needs of our cities”.

They recently hosted the New York City Planning Labs, considered globally to be at the forefront of using open source data for city planning.

Discussions were held about Ballarat’s Smart Cities Program, Creative Cities Strategy and the digital planning reform agenda.

Talks were also held over the City of Ballarat’s recently completed pilot of using virtual reality in future community engagement, and the use of digital processes to speed up planning application assessments.

The work currently underway in Ballarat leverages off the Future of Planning Program which aims to completely modernise and transform the United Kingdom’s planning system.

The Future Cities Catapult Centre has led a range of data driven pilot projects which include an AI chatbot that will answer planning queries and provide access to planning data, a working prototype of a tool to de-risk the land appraisal and planning process for small developers, and development of a “building with nature” tool to support green infrastructure.

The outcomes and learnings from these pilots can be directly applied to the Victorian Planning System.

The City of Ballarat will use these learnings to continue to lead digital planning reform in Australia, with the potential to radically streamline the assessment of many planning related processes.