Participatory planning
with AI, for cities.
CoPlanAI structures how many people propose, compare and converge on futures for a real place — in the room and online. A resident’s phrase becomes an image in seconds, so expertise is no longer the price of entry. The output isn’t a design — it’s a mandate: documented evidence of what a community can agree to want.
Online or in the room, what you are really building is trust.
That part belongs to people. The AI only mediates the session and keeps the record straight — so what was agreed can be shown, and challenged, afterwards.
All the complexity of scenario planning, made simple enough to design together.
Participants start from a real photo and say the change they want — “more trees, a safer crossing.” The platform renders it, supervised, in seconds; the group compares, argues and votes. Behind the room, an organiser from the city’s own team configures the session and steers it live.
Choose where images come from — upload, library or map — and how people reshape them: theme, draw or prompt.
Each direction on the table gets a prompt, a description and its expected impacts.
A live gallery with built-in impact assessment lets you moderate and read the room.
Built for the people who convene the room.
Give participation creative weight — and leave with a defensible, bankable mandate.
Our usual entry point: the team with the mandate to experiment before the line organisation commits.
UNDP, GIZ and others — widening participation where budgets are thin and traditions young.
Research partners and an “Expo mode” kiosk that turns participation into somewhere people choose to go.
Powerful enough to matter — restrained by design.
Bringing AI into a planning institution isn’t a tooling decision; it changes how the institution decides. So we hold ourselves to an explicit ethic on both fronts — how the AI is used, and what it costs the planet.
European by default. Yours by right.
CoPlanAI runs on secure European cloud infrastructure and is built to the standards public institutions must meet. Here’s exactly how your data is handled — and who owns what.
Servers, databases and infrastructure hosted in AWS Europe unless otherwise agreed with the client.
Data minimisation, purpose limitation and security by design; AWS acts as data processor.
A decision-support tool, not an automated decision-maker — transparency and human oversight throughout.
All results and aggregated preferences remain the client’s property, to use, modify and distribute freely.
Built & run in Helsinki 🇫🇮
CoPlanAI is a service by SPIN Unit — an urban-data and participatory-design studio — built and run from the centre of Helsinki, on IKON AI infrastructure. Come say hei. Before 2025 we delivered this service under the name UrbanistAI.
Co-founder of CoPlanAI and of SPIN Unit, an urban research practice. Runs academic projects at Tampere University and the Estonian Academy of Arts, and is an ambassador at BAITT. Previously co-founder of UrbanistAI.
damiano.cerrone@coplanai.comCo-founder of CoPlanAI and partner at SPIN Unit. PhD urban sociologist and docent at the University of Turku, where he is Research Director of Urban Studies and directs the Turku Urban Research Programme. Professor of Practice at the University of Vaasa and part-time senior researcher at the University of Helsinki. Works on urban policy, planning, and how cities and universities actually collaborate.
sampo.ruoppila@coplanai.comWhat partners can count on.
The headline commitments from our standard Service Level Agreement.