Researchers have developed the first AI tool designed specifically for urban planners. PlanGPT is a specialized large language model (LLMs)—models that are pre-trained on vast amounts of data—developed as part of a collaboration between educational institutions including the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning, according to Marktechpost article by Adnan Hassan.
Hassan explains how this could be a game changer for planners because, until now, their use of general purpose LLMs has been limited to text generation and information retrieval, mainly because specialized terminology and complex requirements involved in planning make more advanced urban and spatial tasks on those models impossible. He writes, “[PlanGPT] significantly improves the precision of information extraction from urban planning texts, leveraging domain-specific fine-tuning and advanced tooling capabilities to meet the unique demands of the field.” Hassan reports that empirical tests have shown PlanGPT to deliver higher-quality and relevant responses compared to existing state-of-the-art models in typical urban planning tasks.
