Urbain: your AI expert on French local urban plans – PLU and PLUi
Urbain is an AI assistant dedicated to French local urban plans (PLU) and their inter-municipal equivalents (PLUi), the documents that set zoning and building rules for every plot of land in France. It answers technical questions in natural language, down to the parcel level, and links each answer directly to the relevant section of the regulations.
Designed for local authority planning departments that review building permits, consulting firms, notaries and property developers, it supports professionals who extract and interpret regulatory constraints from dense documents every day. Urbain doesn’t replace urban planning and real estate experts: it frees up their time to focus on analysis, consultation and decision-making.
context
Urban Planning Documents: A Daily Challenge
Dense, technical regulations
A local urban plan (PLU or PLUi) runs to several hundred pages: written regulations, zoning maps, planning and development guidelines, and public utility easements. Assessing the rules that apply to a single parcel means cross-referencing these heterogeneous, scattered sources.
Time-consuming analysis
Reviewing a permit application, issuing a zoning certificate or assessing a project’s feasibility calls for both textual and spatial analysis at the parcel level, along with regulatory calculations, often under tight deadlines. This work is hard to standardize from one project to the next and demands significant expertise.
Reliable, shareable answers
An answer on zoning rules commits the responsibility of the local authority or professional who gives it: it must be backed up clause by clause. It must also be clear to non-specialists, such as elected officials, property developers and partners.
our promise
Your local urban plan, decoded in seconds
Urbain cross-references the full text of the regulations, zoning maps, planning and development guidelines (OAP) and public utility easements (SUP) to give you a sourced answer specific to each parcel.
features
From question to the cited answer
Immediate time savings
Get straight to the relevant regulations without sifting through hundreds of pages or decoding planning jargon.
Natural-language search across local urban plans- Suggested questions to get you started
Reliable answers, hallucinations kept in check
Every answer cross-checks the regulations against the map layers.
- Covers written regulations, zoning maps, planning guidelines (OAP) and easements (SUP)
- Direct links to the cited articles
Parcel-level analysis
Every answer is tied to a specific parcel, for a precise reading of the rules that apply there.
- Map and chat working side by side
- Direct parcel selection on the map
Shared understanding across teams
Your teams and partners work from the same version of the plan, with answers everyone can understand, experts or not.
- Question history, with the option to rerun past queries
- Direct sharing of analyses with your whole team
In short
Zoning answers you can trust
Planning departments, consulting firms, notaries and property developers: Urbain answers your questions about local urban plans (PLU and PLUi) in plain language, at the parcel level, and shows you exactly where each answer comes from.
Urbain is available as SaaS or via API, with pricing tailored to your needs. Contact us to learn more.
