UrbanForm · AI Policy

UrbanForm helps cities, counties, and the people who build in them understand what the rules allow. We turn zoning codes, parcel records, and development standards into clear, interactive tools that planners, managers, economic development staff, architects, developers, and builders can actually use.

We use AI in some of that work. So we want to be plain about what AI does for us, what it never does, and why.

 

Our one principle

Everything we build exists to support human decision-making — to empower it, to keep it accountable, and to strengthen the relationships it depends on. Our use of AI serves only that goal.

 

Land-use decisions belong to people: to the planner reading the code, the manager weighing a community's priorities, the developer deciding whether a project pencils, the architect shaping what gets built. Those judgments carry public trust and real consequences. They should stay with the humans who are accountable for them. AI is a tool we use to give those people better information, faster — never a substitute for their judgment.

 

What this means in practice

AI never makes the decision. It does not issue determinations, approve projects, interpret your ordinance for the record, or replace staff review. Our tools inform a decision; a person makes it.

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The adopted code is the authority. When we use AI to help structure or summarize a jurisdiction's zoning code, the jurisdiction's officially adopted ordinance always governs. We link back to the source so anyone can check our work against it.

 

Accountability is built in, not bolted on. We design for traceability — sources cited, data versioned, and a clear path from any answer back to the record it came from. A planner should always be able to show their work, and so should we. Our staff review the AI-assisted work that goes into our products.

 

We support relationships, we don't automate them away. The conversation between staff and an applicant, between a city and its residents, between a developer and a planning department — that is where good outcomes come from. Our tools exist to make those conversations clearer and better-informed, not to remove the people from them.

 

Your data is treated with care. We work primarily from public records. We don't sell your data, and we don't use customer information to do anything other than deliver and improve the service you've asked us for.

 

Our promise

 

We will keep humans in the loop, keep our sources visible, and keep improving the accuracy of what we deliver. Where AI helps us serve you better, we'll use it. Where it would put distance between you and a decision you're accountable for, we won't.

 

If you ever have a question about how AI shows up in our work, ask us. We'd rather have that conversation than have you guess.

 

— The UrbanForm team

Questions: support@urbanform.us