TL;DR

City Scope, a tool that uses AI to summarise planning applications and plot them on a map, has expanded from Edinburgh to all 32 Scottish local authorities. Its builder, 26-year-old Harry Williams, wants it to make large and contentious schemes, including data centres, easier for residents to follow.

How it works

Williams built City Scope over more than a year, outside his day job in the automation and systems team at estate agent Rettie. The tool collects new applications from council portals, writes a plain summary of each and places it on a map. It also gives every application a score from 1 to 10 for how much it is likely to affect the surrounding area.

Users can now search across the whole of Scotland and filter by that impact score, the type of development, date, or a specific street or postcode. Williams says the aim is for people to understand what is proposed near them without needing to know how the planning system works.

He said he hopes “the rest of Scotland can see the benefits”, and wants the site to “surface more nationally significant projects, including things like data centres”.

Why the timing is apt

The expansion lands in the same week that MSPs backed a 12-month pause on data centre decisions, and as residents in Larbert and Ayrshire fight hyperscale proposals. A recurring complaint in those disputes is that communities felt consulted late or not at all. A searchable, summarised feed of every application will not change who decides, but it can shorten the time between a scheme being lodged and local people noticing it.

There are limits worth stating. An AI summary is only as good as the documents behind it, and the 1 to 10 impact score is the tool’s own judgement, not a planning assessment. Williams himself says there is still “a great deal” of work to do, particularly for places with no community council to discuss what is proposed. Readers should treat the scores as a prompt to open the application rather than a verdict on it.

Looking forward

Williams plans to spend the next few months on community features, so residents can discuss applications on the platform. For councils, a public, AI-generated summary of every application raises a fair question: if one developer working in his spare time can make planning this legible, why do official portals remain so hard to search? Watch whether Scotland’s forthcoming national guidance on data centres says anything about how applications are published.