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AI Visionary Bonnie Shaw is Helping Put AI on the Map for City Planners

Jacque Flaherty

It is estimated that every square kilometer of urban land now produces over 4 terabytes of data every day. Despite this rapid increase in data, there is a growing information asymmetry: that data can be hard access, is often prohibitively expensive, and is difficult to use.

Bonnie Shaw and her team at Place Intelligence build AI-enabled software to help city planners, architects, policy makers, and community leaders make sense of all this data to enable more thoughtful design and decision making. And how she got to this stage in her career is pretty fascinating, too. Keep reading to learn more.

Jacque Flaherty: Please describe your role in your organization and how technology plays a part in it.

Bonnie Shaw: I am the co-founder and chief impact officer for Place Intelligence—a geo-AI startup headquartered in Melbourne, Australia, and globally distributed. We build software and data products to support evidence-based design and decision making. We work with architects and designers, planners and engineers, policy makers and place-based decision makers of all kinds.

My focus in the business is to ensure that our clients (and the communities they serve) see real impact from our products. That means I work across product development, insights and analytics, client engagement, communications, and data literacy and coaching.

Our business is built around the pillars of “toolset, skillset, and mindset”—with the understanding that for new tools to deliver value, the people using them must be skilled and literate in how to evaluate and use them, and that the outputs of that work must land in an organizational culture that values the insights, and is prepared to act on them.

What were your interests early on and what drew you to your line of work?

I have taken a divergent career path that has equipped me with a uniquely multi-disciplinary perspective. This enables me to draw on a broad and interconnected set of skills, practices, and experience from a variety of sectors and areas of knowledge.

As a kid, I had a map of the original Disneyland park taped to my ceiling and went to sleep each night dreaming of creating imaginary worlds. I trained as a landscape architect, town planner, and urban designer to understand complex urban, environmental, and community systems and shape engaging and sustainable environments for people.

As an urban designer, I was involved in a wide variety of projects—from the master planning and design of cities for millions of people in China and the middle east, to community-led revitalization projects in some of the UK’s most disadvantaged areas. I was always interested in how you engage people and local communities in the design process, and how you build literacy and shared perspective in change.

This led to the creation of a surprise hit game and a sidestep into the world of street gaming and interactive theatre making in London, Amsterdam, and New York. This work led to fellowships at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London and the Senseable Cities Lab at MIT.

From there, I moved into a role in technology product development, working with organizations like NASA, the World Bank, Deloitte, Capital One Bank, and the Foundation for Young Australians. I was the practice lead for the City of Melbourne’s award-winning smart cities team where I led teams responsible for urban technologies, innovation districts, startups, and knowledge programming.

I have taught at Georgetown University, the Melbourne Business School, and the Australian and New Zealand School of Government. I also helped deliver the first hackathon at the White House.

What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?

I have always prioritized diversity and representation in the teams I manage, to ensure that there is a spectrum of perspective and opinion in discussions and decision making. Over time, I have seen this paid back several times over as people who came into these roles early in their careers have been rapidly promoted into leadership roles and continue to prioritize diversity in their hiring practices.

My greatest joy (outside of my family) is to work with a group of creative and talented people to create beautiful things—products, places, events, experiences, that provide opportunities for people to participate, learn, and grow in some way. I am extremely grateful for the countless opportunities I’ve had to do this throughout my career.

Now, at Place Intelligence, my focus is on helping to evolve the practice of evidence-based design and decision making for the built environment. I get to collaborate with some of the worlds most talented and dedicated architects, engineers, and policy makers, data scientists, programmers, and statisticians as we evolve a suite of tools to support an evolution of practice that will enable better city design, more responsive decision making, significant cost savings, and more equitable outcomes in this critical moment.

When you’re not working, how do you like to decompress?

When I’m not working, I prefer to be completely offline and engaged in something deeply tactile. A few years ago, I trained as a Human Potential Coach with a focus on bio-hacking for stress management, so I maintain a pretty rigorous practice around health and wellbeing. For me, that means spending plenty of time offline, with family and friends (preferably at the beach or in the bush), gardening, cooking, reading, or tabletop gaming with my kids.

Why does AI matter for what you do?

Built environment professionals, policy makers, and place-based originations are demanding more information than ever before. This is because design and architecture, urban infrastructure, community policy, disaster recovery, and place-based investment have lasting impacts on millions of people’s lives.

The context of these decision-making environments has changed; solving complex place-based challenges requires deep knowledge of how cities and places work. As we see shifting behaviors and major disruption play out in our cities and environments—with increasingly disruptive environmental events, evolving ways of working and economic activity, rapidly changing demographics and community change, shrinking budgets coupled with higher demands for city services—we need better decisions, faster. We need the ability to rapidly respond with greater confidence.

It is estimated that every square kilometer of urban land produces over 4 terabytes of data every day. Despite this rapid increase in data, there is a growing information asymmetry, and most built environment professionals are unable to access and utilize this vast data because it can be hard to find, is often prohibitively expensive, and is difficult to use.

Our mission is to make it easy to access and use big data in built environment decision making—to help professionals to quickly understand the dynamics of places, to monitor trends over time, and enable better solutions with a higher degree of confidence in the outcomes.

My hope is that in the next five years, we will have a much greater understanding of how our places and environments function, and the factors that contribute to their success. And that this knowledge can be put into service for creating and managing more sustainable and equitable outcomes for all.

When you think about your industry in five or ten years, how will AI have affected it? How do you feel about that?

My hope is that in the next five years, we will have a much greater understanding of how our places and environments function, and the factors that contribute to their success. And that this knowledge can be put into service for creating and managing more sustainable and equitable outcomes for all.

I am excited to contribute to the development of AI-enabled software and data tools that support an evolution of evidence-based design practice for the built environment sector. Many practitioners are already embracing the use of data in design practice, and over the next give years I am excited to see the leaps and bounds these talented people will make as the tools evolve, more shared knowledge becomes available, and more skilled graduates enter the workforce.

What’s your advice for organizations hesitant to adopt AI? 

You don’t build muscle by watching someone else lift weights.

You should think about engaging with emerging technologies as a practice—in the same way that you practice the law. Building up literacy and competency in how AI might be useful in your business is something that should be investigated, applied, and tested in practice, developing skills and literacy over time.

You wouldn’t watch a bunch of videos of people deadlifting, and then walk into a gym and expect to lift the heaviest weight on your first go. You’ve got to build up the muscles and technique over time.  


Jacque Flaherty is a senior marketing manager at Relativity, focusing on advocating for our user communities in EMEA and APAC.

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