Evaluate · Dubai Municipality · 2025–2026
Dubai Municipality’s Urban Planning & Quality of Life Department was reviewing schemes against guidance spread across multiple manuals, with some design-review cycles taking up to a month. Rather than buy a faster rendering tool, the Department signed a year-long, three-cycle engagement from November 2025 to change how it works: its own planners mapped their workflows side by side in the first workshop, then — 10 participants in 5 teams over three days in July 2026 — built the fix themselves.
Who took part
Planners, engineers, draughtsmen, 3D specialists and decision-makers from the Department’s Urban Design, Urban Planning and Politics & Studies sections, facilitated by the project team.
What the tool did
In the “Clause Hunt”, planners went through the Hatta design manual line by line, flagged every ambiguous clause and decided together what each rule should mean — encoding the unambiguous ones into a compliance engine while deliberately reserving genuine ambiguity for human judgement. Three guardrails sat on every table: a named planner signs every AI-assisted output; AI assists, triages and drafts while planners make all decisions; capability comes before automation.
What changed
Each team authored and ratified its own integration plan — who runs each step, what evidence justifies making a pilot permanent, and which leadership meeting will judge that evidence, booked in the Department’s own calendar. The first two of three cycles are complete; evaluation is under way, and the Municipality’s measure of success is the number of planners who can run, audit and improve these processes without CoPlan in the room.
