How an architect became a digital planner

Architecture can be a restless profession, a constant shifting between the scale of a detail and the systems that allow a building to be put together in the first place. At the same time, the organisations we encounter in order to realise a building can feel removed from this intimacy. Job descriptions rarely last past the interview stage, and once in practice, architects must remain agile to the shifting needs of each project.

Architect Derin Fadina arrived at Brent Council with that instinct. He worked predominantly on retrofit and commercial refurbishment projects across London, often dealing with heritage buildings and the accumulated constraints of an existing structure. He had also spent a brief period working in urban design, giving him some experience of thinking at a larger spatial scale. Alongside practice, he has taught architecture at Central Saint Martins, Ravensbourne, and the University of Westminster. His writing developed through the 2022 New Architecture Writers programme and has since appeared in the Architects’ Journal, The Architectural Review, RIBA Journal, and e-flux Architecture. It was a background less obviously aligned with planning, but one that had trained him to pick apart complicated systems and understand how their parts fit together.

Planning was new territory for Derin, but the newly created role of Principal Digital Planning Officer drew on skills he had already developed elsewhere. Seven months in, the boundaries of that role are already becoming porous. He moves between spatial data and planning processes, picking up pieces of work that fall between established teams.

In his own words, he has become interested in being the department’s “Swiss army knife”, taking on difficult jobs as the need arises - an important outlook in the digital sphere where systemic digital change will necessarily cut across departmental lines. In that sense, the move from architect to digital planner is less of a departure than it first appears.

His interest in planning had begun much earlier. While researching the architect-planner Max Lock for his master’s thesis, Derin became interested in Lock’s civic diagnosis: a method that looked beyond buildings to the social and economic life of the places being planned. “Since then, I’ve always been interested in this broader, more comprehensive method of practising in the built environment,” he says. For Derin, conventional architectural practice had begun to feel increasingly constrained in the influence it could exert. “The role of the architect, in its typical form, is much too constrained, and ever-diminishing in influence and leverage.” Public Practice offered a route into that wider field. “The associate programme sought to expand the role and wheelhouse of the architect,” Derin says, while its learning and development programme promised support through the move into local government.

Behind Derin’s role is a nationwide attempt to digitise the English planning system and drag its disconnected databases together. Through Open Digital Planning, a national community of local planning authorities supported by MHCLG, Brent secured funding to create a new role as part of their Digital Planning Improvement Fund. Together, the LPA’s are working towards a planning system where information is structured as data and digital tools can be shared between councils. The £50,000 DPIF grant asks councils to assess their digital maturity and clean up planning data for publication on the national Planning Data Platform. The money is intended to build the capacity that allows councils to understand what they already have and make it useful, and as such cannot be used for items such as software.

Brent chose to put that capacity into a person, creating the new post of Principal Digital Planning Officer. It was not alone in doing so. Westminster used the same fund to hire a dedicated digital project officer, while Bristol invested in the skills of its existing staff as it worked through legacy systems.

The common problem is one of attention: difficult digital work tends to sit between existing jobs until somebody is given the time to own it. Public Practice was used to find what John Stiles, Brent’s Placemaking Manager, calls a “hybrid architect” with GIS experience and a broader instinct for systems. The recruit would need to understand the datasets and wider systems as spatial evidence. A requirement of the ODP funding was that all datasets be uploaded within a year, and when we speak seven months into his role, the final dataset has just been posted.

There is a challenge here to the idea of what sort of architect transfers well into the public sector. Derin’s previous architectural experience was weighted towards Stage 4 and the later, technical end of projects. He arrived with an appetite for technical resolution and the patience to understand how a system has been assembled. That mindset has proved well suited to digital planning. The formal job description was written closely around the funding requirements, though Brent always expected the role to grow. Recruiting someone with broader skills gave the council scope to extract value beyond the fund.

In a disjointed system, it can sound insurmountable. But breaking it down, digital planning is a case of understanding where information sits, who controls it and how different people need to use it, both the officers working inside the planning system and the public trying to navigate it from outside. Derin’s first major task was a Digital Planning Maturity Assessment, which takes a council through its existing technology and asks how well its information moves through the service. For somebody who had never worked inside a planning department, it became a great induction. “To get a sense of what the planning department is, I’ve had to meet a lot of people very quickly,” Derin explains.

Peter van der Zwan, Brent’s Principal Urban Design Officer and another Public Practice Alum, describes Derin’s brief as “slightly nebulous”. “It demands a really strong understanding of systems and how those things work,” he says. “He can come up against a lateral problem which demands problem solving from a number of different angles and just sort of grasp it and figure it out.”

This is where Derin began to become a planner, through the back of the machine, tracing how its parts speak to one another.

Gerry Ansell, Brent’s Director of Regeneration and Climate, describes digital planning as an area “you know is important, but you never have the time to do it properly”. “Having somebody focused on that I think has been enormously helpful,” he says. The work builds on officers who already understand the service deeply, giving Derin the time and licence to connect work they have rarely had capacity to join up.

Much of digital planning transformation is meant to be so smooth and clean that the user may not even notice the innovation they are experiencing. This may happen when a homeowner wants to build an extension and needs to know whether planning permission is required. They search the council website, perhaps discover that their house is in a conservation area, then discover permitted development for the first time. For those who work in architecture, this is familiar territory. For somebody altering a home for the first time, it can require hours of research.

PlanX is designed to help. Developed by Open Systems Lab with local planning authorities through Open Digital Planning, it allows councils to construct online planning services as decision trees. It can pull spatial constraints directly from the national data platform, checking whether an address falls within a conservation area or is affected by another planning designation. Crucially, the rules are written and controlled by planning authorities themselves. It is not an A.I. tool, so the service follows a fixed decision tree, rather than generating an answer, and thus it cannot invent a planning rule or hallucinate a constraint that is not in the underlying data.

“PlanX is purely about homeowners, really,” says Derin of the service Brent intends to launch. “It’s targeted to people who are trying to do small-scale stuff.” He is particularly interested in those “who don’t have proximity to the planning service”. The people submitting the smallest applications are often those least able to pay somebody else to interpret the system for them.

Derin found the opportunity himself. Further ODP funding offered councils a first year of PlanX, provided enough of the necessary datasets were ready. The logic is circular: councils first improve the data, then unlock a tool that makes that work visible to residents. Derin had to convince the government that Brent could get enough of its datasets ready, then win support internally. Asked what he is most proud of from the placement, he says: “I think it would be PlanX. I’m really proud of that, especially [of] getting the funding and also getting the buy-in from senior leadership.”

Brent’s growing Public Practice Alum community begins with John, who entered the public sector in 2019 as an Associate at Transport for London before later joining Brent. He arrived at a time when confidence around design was low. Over time, he pushed it further into everyday planning discussions and eventually became manager of the council’s placemaking team. That team now includes urban design alongside digital planning, with Derin’s role extending its reach into spatial data. “We’re not just sitting back here being a reactive planning service,” John says. “We’ve got a lot of ideas about what we want to do and we want to make positive change.”

Peter joined Brent after his own Public Practice placement elsewhere. By the time he arrived, much of the slow relationship-building required of a new urban designer had already happened. John knew the councillors and had established credibility with planning colleagues. “For me coming in was kind of a breeze,” Peter says. “Because John has done so much of that here and continues to do that, that really enables me to get on with just producing stuff.” Derin then arrived behind Peter, into a team already fluent in what an architect moving into local government could offer. From Gerry’s more senior vantage point, there is value in repeatedly bringing people into the service who have not been formed entirely by it. Councils, he says elsewhere, “tend to be very cautious and stick with what’s known”, while work such as digital planning can remain important without anybody having the time to pursue it properly. Against that backdrop, an outside perspective has practical value. “They bring fresh ideas and ask questions that we might not have thought of,” he says.

Public Practice also solved a practical problem. DPIF money came with a tight delivery window, when compared to the timelines of traditional council recruitment. John says Public Practice felt like the obvious route partly because “we knew that we could get someone relatively quickly”. More importantly, he trusted it to find somebody with a broad base of abilities. “They may not be a specific expert in the thing that we need,” he says, “but they will have a lot of transferable and relevant skills.”

This cumulative effect is becoming a significant part of Public Practice’s wider legacy. In 2025, it was reported that 74 per cent of Associates were still working in the public sector two years after completing the programme. At Brent, Alums become managers and recruit the next person. Each appointment leaves better conditions for the next one.

John wants Brent to do more design for itself. He and Peter are building an in-house service intended to reduce reliance on external consultants, with the hope that Derin could become part of it once his initial funding ends. “We should be moving more towards an insourcing model rather than outsourcing,” John says. Work that might otherwise be commissioned externally, such as masterplans or feasibility studies, could instead be produced inside the council, keeping both expertise and value within the authority.

The ambition is to use the placemaking team more like an in-house consultancy, commissioned by other teams inside the council to work on masterplans or feasibility studies, before external consultants are brought in. Early pilots have already brought revenue back into the team, which can in turn be reinvested in its resources. Derin’s mix of spatial data and design knowledge would allow the council to examine development capacity early, while proposals are still loose enough to change.

This is also the clearest mechanism through which a one-year funded post could become a lasting capacity. DPIF created Derin’s role to solve a defined digital problem. If that expertise can then support work elsewhere in the council, and potentially generate income through an in-house service, the temporary post begins to make its own case for permanence.

Gerry is less optimistic about the pace of digital planning nationally, describing its development as “painfully slow”. Councils can become tied to established software providers and systems that take years to change. “Digital is the area where we need to maybe take a few chances,” he says.

Derin’s work on PlanX offers a small example of what that requires in practice. When the proposal met resistance internally, he went back to the developers to understand the tool himself, then worked upwards through the council to secure support. His role gives Brent somebody with enough knowledge of the service to test whether an obstacle is genuinely technical, or simply inherited from the way things have been done before.

The value of that capacity will extend beyond the initial digital programme, with Derin’s next work potentially taking him into Brent’s emerging Local Plan, where the government’s wider move towards standardised planning data is beginning to reach plan-making itself. New statutory guidance introduced in 2026 requires specified Local Plan information to be published according to approved data standards. At Brent, John sees Derin’s combination of GIS and design skills feeding into the borough-wide characterisation study, then into more detailed plot testing and feasibility work for potential site allocations. “With those hybrid skills between urban design and GIS, there’s huge scope to actually do those activities in a much better way than we ever have done before,” he says. The boundaries of Derin’s digital brief are already beginning to shift.

There is a legacy of Public Practice Alums who have remained inside the council, created new roles and widened the scope of what the planning service can do. Derin arrived to deliver a defined digital programme, and this work will soon complete, and he will be able to open up new chapters of possible and exciting system reform.

Retrofit begins with an existing condition whose systems have been altered over time; the work is to understand what remains before deciding where to intervene. Derin has approached Brent in much the same way, reading the planning service as something already built and making targeted changes from inside it. Public Practice has allowed successive Alums to work from within that existing structure, each leaving behind a little more capacity for the next.