Currently, the draft version of the Vancouver Official Development Plan (ODP) is nearly 200 pages long. For a document that’s meant to address the general public’s needs, the ODP may be too difficult for many of these people to access and understand. Our project focuses on solving this issue by creating a chatbot trained on Vancouver’s ODP. Addressing this problem is important because these documents can be a major factor in making decisions regarding housing, business opportunities and community engagement. The chatbot can take in any question that the user asks, look through the ODP for context and answer in plain language—clear and concise. All the user needs to do is ask a question to the chatbot instead of having to scour through the lengthy document. The whole process would take around 20 seconds, and it would help remedy the issue of the document’s accessibility.

We chose this solution as AI usage is a rising trend among people today. AI-driven chatbots are becoming an increasingly popular and intuitive way for people to access information. By combining AI with the official documents, we bridge the gap between complex policies and everyday understanding.

The potential impact of this project would be the increase of public awareness as well as engagement with urban planning policies. By improving the accessibility, the chatbot promotes equity, supports civic engagement, and helps residents feel more connected to their community.

The call to action is simple! Residents, students, and business owners should use this tool to explore and understand city planning in Vancouver. By engaging with our chatbot, users can make decisions, or just get a better understanding of what is happening in their community!

NEXT STEPS

Now that the semester is over, the next steps involve us exploring the different paths we could take this project. Currently, the chatbot is a working prototype, and is not available for public use. However, if we choose to refine the model based on feedback, we would focus on further improving the accuracy, clarity, usability, and interface.

Some potential next steps we could implement include integrating Vancouver’s official website; this would further expand our scope of Vancouver. However, we could also take a different direction. This would involve training the model on all the publicly accessible cities’ ODP documents. By broadening our scope, our chatbot would now be a tool for understanding urban planning policies across multiple municipalities in British Columbia.

If resources and our schedule allow, we aim to continue working on the project. At a minimum, we have shared our findings and prototype with a larger audience outside of our classroom, and hope our efforts to improve the public understanding of Vancouver’s planning policies are supported.