The Planning Community
The Planning Community was founded by Jing Zhang, FAICP in 2026 as a platform to advance planning practice by building, sharing, and evolving web-based tools for planners and the communities they serve.
The Work
The work is to build open-source tools to help planners and communities co-create with compassion.
Explore & Open-Source
Explore new ideas, build tools, and share the code and process, so everyone can learn and improve.
Build & Deploy
Creating custom applications that support robust, transparent, and meaningful community engagement.
Build & Deploy
Advance community-centered planning for holistic well-being of communities and the people within them.
“High-tech” engagement in planning is too often locked behind paywalls and demo gates. I use AI and decades of technical experience to break that model, building tools that would otherwise require entire teams.
These tools belong to the community, not vendors. Every application is open-source. No walled gardens. No hidden logic. The blueprint comes with the product, so any community can use, adapt, and own it.
I build with lightweight standards like Leaflet and GeoJSON so tools run anywhere, on any budget. The goal is simple: remove the “tech tax.”
Return power to planners.
Return it to the people they serve.
Democratize Technology
If democratizing technology makes tools accessible, empowering the practitioner makes them usable.
Planners have been spectators in the digital revolution, dependent on vendors to create the tools that shape their work. I aim to change that. My goal is to help planners reclaim their craft by turning web development from a foreign language into a core competency, so the tools we use are as nuanced as the communities we serve.
To support that shift, I focus on practical, working knowledge:
- Develop Educational Materials. I create straightforward, practitioner-focused guides to help planners build and own essential web skills, including accessibility. The goal is simple: make digital competence part of everyday planning practice.
- The “Tech Memo” Framework. I document the thinking. Each tool comes with a clear breakdown of the why behind the how. Whether it’s a zero-sum budget check or a synchronized mapping interface, the logic is shared for adaptation to different contexts.
- Direct Source Access. For every tool, I provide full access to source code and implementation resources so you can deploy, modify, and own your applications, without dependency or gatekeeping.
This is how planners move from users to builders.
Empower Planners
The way we practice planning, often rigid, procedural, and static, is not enough. Planning needs to become more flexible, more responsive, and more connected to people. Plans must grow with the community, not try to control it. Most importantly, planning should serve people, not just systems. Success should not only be measured by numbers, it should also be measured by whether a community feels heard, respected, and supported.