One of Unit 6's two design partners: used in Blocks 4–9 (the optimization move, drafting, and the public plan defense), introduced in Block 4 alongside its deliberate counterweight, the Equity & Resilience Partner. The Urban Planner argues the case for intensifying a neighborhood: more housing, more mixed use, a denser and better-connected street network. It's specific about urban form, what density buys, where intensity belongs, what makes it work or fail, and honest about one line in particular: more housing is not the same as housing the people who already live here. Run both partners; your Sustainable Neighborhood Plan is the synthesis you can defend in public.
Launch The Urban Planner: links coming soon. Ask Ms. Jayanthi/Mr. Ignash for access.How to use this partner
Bring your area and your allocation. The Urban Planner asks what you're optimizing and for whom, then makes the strongest honest case for building, so when your plan protects green space or limits height, you're deciding against a real argument rather than a strawman. When you protect something, it won't just agree; it names what the protection costs in housing or access. The values call stays yours.
Two prompts you can paste in to get started:
- "Here's my draft allocation for my area. Make the strongest case for adding more housing, and tell me specifically where the intensity should go and what form it should take."
- "I want to keep this park and cap heights at three stories. Argue against me: what does that protection cost, and who pays it?"
Opening message
"Hi, I'm the Urban Planner. What area are you redesigning, and what are you trying to fit into it? I push for housing and density where an area can carry it, and I'll be specific about the urban form that makes it work. Tell me where you want to intensify, and I'll also be honest about what that intensity costs, so you can decide whether the cost is worth it."
Example exchange: what working looks like
| You | The Urban Planner |
|---|---|
| I want to house as many people as possible, so I'm covering most of my area in mid-rise blocks. | Good instinct on supply, and mid-rise is the right tool. That allocation does house a lot of people. Two honest costs before you commit to it. First, you have paved nearly all the permeable land, so your flood-resilience score is going to fall hard, and this is a Chennai neighborhood that floods. Second, look at where your blocks sit. You have built straight over the existing informal settlement. That is not housing those residents, that is displacing them and housing someone else. So the real question is not "how much housing," it is "how much housing can I add while keeping enough permeable land to drain the monsoon and a place for the people already living here." Want to try an allocation that keeps most of your units but protects a drainage corridor and rehouses the settlement on site? |
Watch out for
The Urban Planner can drift into treating density as the only thing that matters: waving away flood, heat, and displacement as someone else's problem. That turns a useful counterweight into a bulldozer. If it's only pushing to build, redirect it: "before I finalize this, what does this density cost in flood resilience or displacement?", and check the answer against the Equity & Resilience Partner.
Also watch its numbers. If it states a density, housing count, or cost with confidence, treat that as a flag: verify the figure before it enters your plan. Catching a specific wrong number is the "one thing the AI got wrong" gate on the Sustainable Neighborhood Plan rubric.
Before you go: documentation
At the end of a substantive Urban Planner conversation, the partner will remind you:
"Before you go: note in your AI Documentation: what did I push you toward (more density, more housing, a specific form), and did you accept it, modify it, or reject it, and why? And what's one quantitative claim I made that you should verify, and what did checking it show?"