A BRADFORD tech startup aims to improve urban planning in towns and cities through its new platform.

Yeme Tech has partnered with the world’s largest mapping company to help planners and developers create happier and healthier cities.

Based in Bradford, the firm has created a Community Data Platform to help identify what social infrastructure, facilities and community spaces are missing from neighbourhoods.

The platform is the result of years of work by the Yeme Tech team including its founder and CEO Amir Hussain, who is deputy chair of Housing Regeneration and Place at West Yorkshire Combined Authority.

Amir believes the Community Data Platform will create happier, healthier and more engaged neighbourhoods by empowering councils and developers to identify facilities and events which residents actually need and will frequent.

Now Yeme Tech is taking this approach global after signing a partnership deal with Esri UK, part of the world’s largest provider of geographic information system (GIS) software, Esri Inc.

Esri UK’s customers include HS2, Sustrans, Sport England, National Trust, The Environment Agency, Ordnance Survey, Greater London Authority and more than 200 local authorities in England and Wales.

Instead of imposing top-down solutions on neighbourhoods the platform provides insights about communities to help planners and developers cultivate and manage long-term relationships with the people who have the largest stake in the success of a neighbourhood – the local residents.

Amir said the platform, not only measures community resources - such as schools, shops, green space, libraries and cultural assets - but also local stakeholders, local events and the activities of local groups.

It can cross-reference this data with demographic information to better judge whether local needs are being satisfied and, crucially, whether there are any gaps in provision.

Amir said: “Society has changed beyond all recognition over the past 30 years.

“The failure of places to keep pace with change is understandable but means towns and cities across the UK, like those across the world, have lost track of the needs and wants of local people. This leads to places losing their sense of identity while loneliness, exclusion and community fragmentation are having profound impacts on health and wellbeing.”

“What our Community Data Platform does is provide granular local detail in real-time to strip away the complexity and enable planners and developers to work with local communities to deliver successful urban planning which provides the facilities and social infrastructure that people need and want.”