Digital technologies have evolved rapidly in the last three decades and are now used daily by planners to process applications, visualise data, communicate with stakeholders, and complete administrative tasks. Despite this integration of digital technology into planning practice, the planning systems within all UK nations have largely remained static in their legal requirements, processes and methods. Simultaneous to these changes, planners in the UK’s devolved planning systems and local planning authorities have faced declining resourcing, growing workloads, and challenges recruiting and retaining staff. While several digital planning pilot projects have been launched/implemented in England and Scotland since 2020, progress in Wales has been slower and more focused on broader issues of public service delivery, digital inclusion, foundational infrastructure, and some exploratory work in planning. As a result, there is a gap in our understanding of digital planning practices in Wales. This research establishes a benchmark of digital planning practices in Wales, and the capacity of local planning authorities (LPAs) to engage with digital planning. The research draws on a desktop review of existing policies, online survey, and two focus groups with professional planners in Wales. The study revealed significant variation in the technical capacity of LPAs to adopt more advanced digital planning technologies and reflects on these to makes specific recommendations on digital planning to ease resource pressures and improve planning outcomes in Wales.

Consultant procurement by the public sector is not a new phenomenon and the tensions that exist between both, in practice and in changes to the built environment from such engagements, have long been studied by planning scholars and experienced by planning practitioners. However, the digitalisation of planning and the embrace of technological tools, many of which are on the cusp of radically altering planning (i.e., digital twins, AI), is generating increasing dependencies on consultants. Despite awareness of how digitalisation is shaping the planning profession, research at the intersection of digitalisation and the role of consultants in this transition is lacking. This paper contributes to this lacuna in a three-part argument: 1) data-driven planning has widened the opening for private sector intervention; 2) this creates a dependence on consultants and furthers the loss of specialist knowledge; and 3) consultants stand to monopolise and privatise public sector data. The argument is supported by a review of Ireland’s 31 local authority development plans and a tool developed by central government to determine housing need and demand projections over a twenty-year period. Results of the review demonstrate existing variations in the development plans between those informed by consultants versus those completed in-house, and between local authorities who procured certain consultants over others. The implications of public sector dependency on consultants matters, not only for the reasons stated above, but because the digitalisation of planning will continue to march forward and the question hinges on the role of the public sector in this evolution.

Artificial Intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, and urban datarization are fundamentally reshaping how planning knowledge is produced, contested, and applied. While these technologies promise efficiency and evidence-based decision-making, they also risk narrowing the epistemological foundations of planning privileging algorithmic rationality over locally embedded, participatory, and socially responsive ways of knowing. This tension is especially acute in the Global South, where rapid urbanization, widespread informality, and uneven digital infrastructures complicate the uncritical adoption of data-driven planning models predominantly developed in Western contexts. Drawing on Foucault's concept of power/knowledge alongside spatial justice frameworks, the paper situates AI-driven planning within broader struggles over whose knowledge counts, who governs urban space, and on whose terms. It argues that smart-city paradigms, as currently conceived, risk reproducing colonial and technocratic logics that sideline informal realities, local expertise, and community voice precisely the conditions most prevalent across Global South cities. Responding to the conference theme of Building Planning Up, this paper proposes a spatial justice-oriented framework for ethical, participatory AI-enabled planning. It contributes to debates on theoretical renewal, methodological innovation, and disciplinary identity arguing that critically re-examining planning's intellectual foundations is essential to ensuring the discipline remains inclusive, reflective, and fit for purpose in an age of artificial intelligence.