Emerging technologies are fundamentally changing how we plan, develop, and manage cities, as cities around the globe become technologically advanced and connected. Throughout the day-to-day business of running cities, local planning and development offer some of the most fundamental and visible forms of government action, impacting everyone who lives and works in cities.

The set of technological tools that cities use to publish planning and other information to improve the public good has exploded over the last five years, so much that there have emerged "clusters of innovation and investment" within the relatively new field of "civic tech." A Knight Foundation survey of the civic technology field found that the number of civic technology companies grew by roughly 23 percent annually between 2008 and 2013.

This report benchmarks the use of technology in city planning departments across the United States as of July, 2016, identifies trends based on changes from our research in 2015, suggests gold standards for using technology in planning, and predicts how technology trends will impact planning departments in 2017-2018.