Imagine for a second you've been invited to preview a new urban plan. Putting on a virtual reality headset, you are immediately supplanted into an alternative universe which looks and experiences exactly like the 'real world'.
Looking at the new buildings awaiting permission, the system reads your feelings in real time through facial recognition and adapts the designs to suit. You can ask the planning officer to proceed or halt immediately; the planning application has already been automatically validated by a computer in milliseconds, not months.
None of the above is sci-fi; instead it could be coming to a planning department near you in the future. All of this technology is available now and is currently being used in the private sector as normal practice.
As a primer, the 2015 book 'The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts' gives an eye-opening insight into how far into the future we have already come.
Walking around the average town hall, however, one could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
For innovation is coming, and quicker than previously thought.
Buildings are currently being designed through artificial intelligence, making thousands of improvements to each plan through slight variances to environmental factors. In China, robots are already designing and constructing schools.
This need not be expensive either. Yet in Britain, the world of local government planning is bereft with inefficiencies left over from Britain's love for bureaucracy. Chiefs and officers in understaffed departments struggle on, despite a gross lack of funding and investment in skills. Morale often runs low due to an overly combative and anachronistic system that merely creaks on through necessity.
"The Town and Country Planning Act was introduced at the same time as the National Health Service and housing acts. We all know the laws are creaking and they need an overhaul, but nothing has been done," said Mary Parsons, chair of the Town & Country Planning Association.
Tony Pidgley, chair of the Berkeley Group, roused murmurs of agreement from a room of developers in calling for more planning officers and less bureaucracy.
Freeing up planners to make more creative and interesting solutions could possibly create additional benefits for the wider population. Public health professionals argue that well-designed places create positive impacts on every part of a resident's life, yet the magical cross-department approach to planning design has yet to be realised.
No-one naturally wants to live or work in a place of mediocrity. The British engineers and designers behind the SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge did not start from the basis of not rocking the boat.
With the "housing crisis" on ministers' radar, the Ministry for Housing, Communities & Local Government's chief planner Steven Quartermain made clear the "government is serious" about delivering good-quality homes. In removing the local from the local plans process from three districts earlier this year the government's message was clearer still: build new homes or we will do it for you.
All UK local authorities have ambitions to deliver economic regeneration, improve their environments and deliver tangible societal value to residents and businesses.