Benjamin Lee

Navigating planning regulations across 12 different councils. AI helps.

Architects in Australia deal with different planning requirements in every council area. What's allowed in one LGA can be prohibited in another. And the documentation is always dense and buried. I've started using Perplexity as the first step in any planning research for a new project. I give it the council name and the type of project and ask for an overview of the key planning considerations and any recent changes. It gives me a starting map — not a definitive answer, but enough to know what I'm looking for in the actual planning scheme documents. For the documents themselves, I paste the relevant sections into Claude and ask for a plain-language summary plus any provisions that would affect my project specifically. The time this saves is significant — planning scheme documents are not written for humans. I always verify anything critical in the original documents and with the council directly. AI is for getting oriented, not for replacing due diligence. But the time from "new project" to "I understand the planning context" has gone from two days to three hours. That is a meaningful difference.