Yourban Featured in Smart City Mag: When AI Uncovers What People Really Need

📍Athis-Mons, local insights and territorial intelligence at the neighborhood scale.

In its June 2025 edition, Smart City Mag highlights Yourban’s pioneering approach to help local governments better understand and anticipate the real needs of their residents. A full-page feature showcases the work done with the city of Athis-Mons (France), where the municipality relies on Yourban’s Demand Intelligence to guide its planning and service delivery.

The Challenge: Objectifying Actual Needs

In a territory marked by dense commercial zones, the city wanted to refocus on proximity-based needs. With Yourban’s Demand Intelligence powered by AI the local government gained access to subtle behavioral signals and analyzed local demand with unprecedented granularity. This level of precision enables the city to design relevant services, block by block.

Lucille Jaouen, Head of Retail for Athis-Mons, shared:

“Yourban allows us to uncover this information and objectify the needs. For example, we saw a strong demand for tennis and rheumatologists — something we hadn’t previously identified as a priority.”

As a result, the city integrated this finding into its planning for a future health and wellness center.

The Mission: Giving Elected Officials a Clear, Actionable, Human-Centered Vision

In the same article, Amélie Jariel, CEO of Yourban, explains:

“The idea is to give local leaders a clear vision — at the scale of a neighborhood — of the real needs of residents. We help them rapidly deploy services that meet gaps clearly observed in the data.”

This approach transforms how cities make decisions. Gone are assumptions and guesswork — Yourban puts concrete, localized, intelligible data in the hands of decision-makers, enabling them to create spaces and services that truly matter.

"Our approach is by no means a substitute for citizen dialogue — which remains essential. This analysis takes place upstream, at the earliest stages of project design, often several years before implementation. It helps guide initial thinking without unnecessarily involving residents in topics that are still too far off. It also enables those designing public consultations to ask more targeted and relevant questions." said Amélie Jariel.

🧠 Artificial intelligence here becomes a lever for territorial transformation — not just a performance tool, but a catalyst for proximity, impact, and deep listening.

👉 Learn more about our work with cities and explore how Search Intelligence powers the future of local strategies at yourban.ai

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