Civic Gis

civic-gis

GIS toolkit for municipal government and economic development. Compliance checking, post-conflict reconstruction tracking, cadastral publishing, land-use monitoring — plus investment-attraction tools (town profiles, site matching) for small cities and towns.

Sits on top of gis-to-db for data primitives; adds civic-domain business logic and rulesets.

Part of the geospatial-marketplace.

Install

/plugin marketplace add EhssanAtassi/geospatial-marketplace
/plugin install gis-to-db@geospatial-marketplace
/plugin install civic-gis@geospatial-marketplace
/reload-plugins

(gis-to-db is a dependency — several civic-gis skills delegate to it.)

What this plugin does

Most municipal GIS work falls into one of two buckets: enforce rules (zoning, permits, master-plan compliance) or attract investment (pitch the town to outside capital). Existing tools serve one or the other; civic-gis covers both with a coherent set of skills.

Particularly useful for small cities and towns that lack a dedicated GIS team — and for post-conflict reconstruction contexts where the cadastre needs rebuilding alongside the buildings.

Skills

Skill	Purpose	Implementation status
civic-gis-reference	Auto-activating knowledge: zoning systems, cadastral standards (global parcel-ID schemes), civic data sources per region, investment vocabulary, reconstruction frameworks (UN-Habitat, Pinheiro Principles).	✅ Full (5 reference files)
permit-check	Score a proposed project against zoning rules. YAML rulesets per jurisdiction; 3 starters bundled (R-1, C-1, historic-district).	✅ Full (Python rule engine + 3 rulesets + reference + example)
investment-profile	Generate an investor-ready town profile (demographics, infrastructure, available land, incentives, comparable cities) from user-supplied data.	✅ Full (Python generator + Tartus example + data-sources reference)
investment-sites	Match a proposed investment (industry, size, budget) to suitable parcels in a town's inventory. Delegates to gis-to-db:analyze-site for scoring.	⚠ Skeleton — SKILL.md inline rubric; Python orchestrator in v0.2
reconstruction-tracker	Compare pre-event cadastre baseline with current survey; classify each parcel as intact/damaged/destroyed/rebuilt. Delegates to gis-to-db:analyze-diff.	⚠ Skeleton
cadastral-publish	Generate public-facing artifacts (Leaflet map, parcel JSON API, extract PDF template, change log) from an official cadastre with privacy filtering.	⚠ Skeleton
landuse-monitor	Periodic land-use change detection. Flag unauthorized changes against approved master plan; report drift since last snapshot.	⚠ Skeleton

Plus the civic-preflight-validator agent that auto-runs before each action skill (jurisdiction resolution, ruleset lookup, input validation, environment checks).

Quick examples

Permit / compliance check

/civic-gis:permit-check --area parcel.geojson --proposal building.json --jurisdiction homs-syria --zone R-1

Scores a proposed building against the R-1 ruleset. Sample worked example in skills/permit-check/examples/r1-house-check.md.

Investment profile

/civic-gis:investment-profile --town "Tartus" --bbox "35.85,34.85,35.95,34.95" --data-dir ./tartus-data

Generates a markdown profile (demographics + access + land + economy + why-now + risks + comparable cities). Sample worked example for Tartus in skills/investment-profile/examples/small-town-profile.md.

Auto-activating reference

Ask:

What's the difference between a building permit and a use permit?

The civic-gis-reference skill activates silently with terminology + workflow details.

Composition with gis-to-db

Most civic-gis skills delegate to gis-to-db primitives rather than reimplementing them:

civic-gis skill	gis-to-db primitives used
permit-check	gis-formats-reference (CRS, formats); rule-engine pattern adapted from analyze-site
reconstruction-tracker	analyze-diff for parcel-by-parcel change detection
landuse-monitor	analyze-diff (scheduled runs); inspect for new data ingest
cadastral-publish	convert to emit public-facing SQL / GeoJSON
investment-profile	analyze-site for site-suitability factors
investment-sites	analyze-site over candidate parcels filtered by criteria

Configuration

Per-project settings live in .claude/civic-gis.local.md. Copy assets/civic-gis.local.md.template to bootstrap. All fields optional. Configurable: default jurisdiction, custom ruleset paths, language (en/ar/fr), cadastral-publish privacy filters, reconstruction-tracker baseline year + damage standard.

⚠ v0.1 known limitation: the Python scripts do NOT yet parse this settings file. The template documents what v0.2 will support. For v0.1, pass values via CLI flags on each invocation (--jurisdiction, --ruleset-dir, --language, etc.). The civic-preflight-validator agent reads the file for some checks.

Custom rulesets

permit-check looks for rulesets in this order:

1. --ruleset-dir flag
2. ~/.claude/civic-gis/rulesets/<jurisdiction>/<zone>.yaml
3. Built-in starters in assets/rulesets/<zone>.yaml

To codify your municipality's actual zoning code, drop a YAML following the schema in skills/permit-check/SKILL.md. Every rule must carry a citation field pointing to the source regulation — reports surface these so violations are auditable.

Important caveats

• Advisory only, never authoritative. permit-check reports always include an "Authoritative Note" reminding users that final permit decisions are made by humans with regulatory authority.
• Investment profiles must cite sources + dates. Undated or unsourced stats are silently dropped by investment-profile. This is honest discipline, not a bug.
• Reconstruction-tracker treats "destroyed" as "awaiting restitution," never "available." Default behavior aligns with Pinheiro Principles property restitution rights for displaced persons.
• No silent assumption of jurisdiction. Parcels must carry a jurisdiction key (in properties or via flag) — civic-gis refuses to apply rules across jurisdictions.

v0.2 roadmap

• Full Python orchestrators for investment-sites, reconstruction-tracker, cadastral-publish, landuse-monitor.
• Real OSM + World Bank auto-fetch for investment-profile (replaces v0.1 placeholders).
• Overlay ruleset merging for permit-check (R-2 base + historic overlay + floodplain overlay).
• Variance prediction (which rules typically grant variances vs not).
• Notification hooks on landuse-monitor violations.
• Multi-language ruleset translations.
• Settings parsing: scripts read .claude/civic-gis.local.md for project defaults (jurisdiction, ruleset_dir, language, privacy filters, reconstruction baseline year).

License

MIT