InPlanted

To retrofit projects, a streamline to evaluate opportunities, quantify benefits, and prepare city-ready sustainability proposals is lacking. We'll transform sustainability potential to such proposals.

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InPlanted

Inspiration

Cities have ambitious sustainability goals, but organizations often struggle to turn sustainability ideas into actionable projects. Through conversations with officials from the City of Atlanta, including representatives from the Department of City Planning and the Mayor's Office of Sustainability and Resilience, we learned that sustainability projects require coordination among multiple stakeholders, approvals, regulations, and supporting documentation. This inspired us to create a platform that helps organizations move from sustainability potential to implementation-ready proposals.

What it does

InPlanted helps organizations evaluate sustainability opportunities for buildings and land using environmental factors such as heat, stormwater, emissions, and energy impact. The platform transforms those insights into actionable proposals that can be shared with architects, asset managers, and city stakeholders, helping streamline planning and communication throughout the project lifecycle.

How we built it

We researched Atlanta's sustainability initiatives, permitting processes, retrofit workflows, and stakeholder requirements. We also incorporated insights from conversations with city officials, including Al-Nisa Tinglin, Interim Assistant Director of Plan Review in the Department of City Planning, and John Seydel, Deputy Chief Sustainability Officer in the Mayor's Office of Sustainability and Resilience.

Using these findings, we designed a framework that combines sustainability analysis, building visualization, and proposal generation into a single platform. Our prototype demonstrates how environmental data can be translated into implementation-ready recommendations and stakeholder-specific outputs.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was defining the right user and scope. We explored multiple perspectives—from city planners to property owners, architects, and asset managers—and refined the project several times before identifying the workflow we wanted to support.

We also discovered that sustainability projects involve many interconnected approvals, regulations, and stakeholders. Balancing this real-world complexity with the limited timeframe of a hackathon required us to focus on the most impactful parts of the process.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Conducted stakeholder research with officials from the City of Atlanta.
  • Developed a sustainability planning workflow grounded in real-world permitting and planning processes.
  • Connected environmental analysis with actionable project recommendations.
  • Created a framework that serves multiple stakeholders through a single source of information.
  • Built an interactive prototype that demonstrates sustainability opportunity visualization and proposal generation.
  • Successfully evolved the project from a sustainability analysis concept into a broader collaboration and decision-support platform.
  • Combined environmental, business, and policy considerations into a unified planning experience.

What we learned

We learned that sustainability challenges are often coordination challenges. Technical analysis is only one part of the process; communication between organizations, designers, investors, and government stakeholders is equally important.

We also learned the importance of validating ideas with real stakeholders. Speaking directly with city officials helped us better understand permitting workflows, approval requirements, and the practical barriers organizations face when pursuing sustainability projects.

What's next for InPlanted

Our long-term vision is to help organizations move from sustainability goals to approved, implementable projects faster and more effectively. We hope to see InPlanted support sustainability planning efforts in Atlanta by simplifying collaboration between businesses and city stakeholders. Looking ahead, the platform could be expanded to other cities facing similar challenges related to urban heat islands, stormwater management, and climate resilience.

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