Meet the Canadian Software Helping Atlanta’s Urban Planners See the Future  

For Canada’s Jake Arsenault, Georgia has already proven a promising place to scale an impactful enterprise. 

The engineer-turned-entrepreneur behind Inversa Systems, a pioneer in using gamma-ray imaging to assess the health of infrastructure assets like drainage pipes and oil pipelines, started to see success upon landing a deal with the Georgia Department of Transportation. 

Now, in his second act, Mr. Arsenault is returning to the state from his base in Fredericton, New Brunswick, to prove a technology he believes will be more transformative — both for metro Atlanta and the world. 

The Black Arcs is a product of the engineering Ph.D.’s two years of soul-searching and research on a business with the potential to make a dent in a global problem.  The answer was surprising: Upend the process for planning around land use. 

“My view was, OK, it’s really hard to start a business, so to do it, you’ve got to pick something meaningful. So I went with the most socially valuable concept I could devise.” 

The foundational question, he said, was how to help communities visualize the future effects of their plans before committing funds or commissioning lengthy studies, all by simulating “interconnected impacts” of such decisions with one “community planning toolkit.” 

“The idea is that people can rapidly prototype changes with the community on the spot — touch it, feel it, get multiple perspectives, and instead of saying, ‘Well, we’re gonna do a study,’ do that study in the meeting.” 

Decisions like where to locate a school or whether to change zoning to open a new coffee shop are often haphazardly taken. 

“If you look at a lot of who’s steering the wheel, there’s no hands on the wheel,” Mr. Arsenault said. 

And while these might seem like mundane issues, multiplied across countless communities, they become the principal unseen force shaping the world we live in. 

“Our footprint happens incrementally, street by street, block by block, house by house. And that incremental process happens in different silos around the world. That is a force shaping Earth right now. It really is where that rubber hits the road.” 

The Black Arcs — a pun on “The Black Art,” a euphemism for the ink-covered printing presses of the 1400s and onward — offers a subscription-based simulation software to communities and those who work with them.

Using Citisketch, the user can build a digital twin of a community, then populate it with “agents,” dynamic yellow dots on a map representing typical households based on census data.

With that foundation laid, AI modeling is deployed to observe in real-time how, say, carbon emissions might be affected by approving a new drive-thru, or how congestion could increase with a new red light. 

For the mashup of municipalities and counties that comprise metro Atlanta, Mr. Arsenault foresees Black Arcs’ predictive tool helping cut costs dramatically. It can also take on more in-depth custom projects, cutting across city and county borders and disparate data sets.

“This my second venture that’s going save Georgia money, but I think this one could save the state way more money than the other— like a transformative amount of dollars.”

Making Atlanta Inroads

The multiplicity of jurisdictions — and thus, potential customers — is one reason Black Arcs Inc. is poised to establish a footprint in Atlanta instead of the many other cities it could have chosen across the U.S. or Canada.

But equally important for its growth have been the inroads made with local communities through personal connections, some forged at the 50th anniversary bash for the Canadian Consulate General in Atlanta during June 2023. 

“I’ve been coming here for a long time, and then things lined up that one night.” 

A key introduction has been the Pendleton Group, a consulting firm that works with both OpportunitiesNB, the trade and investment arm of the Atlantic Canadian province, and Peachtree Corners, a pioneering smart city in Gwinnett County. New Brunswick has persistently prioritized outreach to the Southeast U.S., and the province will host next summer’s SEUS-Canadian Provinces alliance conference.

Pendleton has helped Curiosity Lab, Peachtree Corners’ living laboratory for autonomous and connected mobility, link up with like-minded innovation hubs around the world. And the firm has brought companies in from Israel, Taiwan and beyond to launch pilot projects using the city’s road, utility and 5G infrastructure. 

Black Arcs recently launched demonstration project with the city to show other municipalities how they might utilize its tools, a connection Mr. Arsenault has called a “game-changer.” 

Another area the company is exploring is the constellation of communities around Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which have come together through the Aerotropolis Atlanta alliance to engage in joint planning as well as economic and workforce development. 

Overall, Mr. Arsenault says, Georgia has strong institutions and universities, an important point for an entrepreneur whose first venture stemmed from research conducted at the University of New Brunswick. Years later, faculty and students from Mr. Arsenault’s alma mater also joined Black Arcs in a pandemic response simulation funded by a $1 million grant from the Canadian Department of National Defence in 2023. 

Communities around Atlanta seem to have the drive to make data-driven decisions and enact responsible governance, he said. 

“There seems to be intent around doing things better, getting it right. And I feel that a lot of places they’re talking the talk. Here, they’re really trying to do a better job.”

CSI for Communities 

While Black Arcs is open to raising capital to fuel the company’s growth, Mr. Arsenault is chiefly concerned with impact. 

He wants to use Citisketch not only to satisfy the needs of experts, but also to do for urban planning what CSI crime shows did for forensics: make it interesting to the average person who may not be inclined to see pizzazz in civic engagement. 

“You live in a machine,” Mr. Arsenault says. “Do you understand the machine you live in? Do you understand how it’s shaping your world?” 

Momentum for this approach came from early pilots. In Sackville, Black Arcs took a large touchscreen to a local farmers market and used Citisketch to engage the community on where to locate three new schools. In Mr. Arsenault’s hometown of Moncton, another project explored whether the city center really needed to add more parking downtown — which was 40 percent covered by lots. 

“We had high school students literally jazzed up to discuss the nuances of downtown surface parking. It went from a boring thing to, ‘This is actually interesting.’” 

While seeking customers, the company is also looking to engage local universities in research projects and connect with regional planning authorities. 

The mission, in the words of technology director Dane Sheppard, is to “nudge global empathy by a little bit,” Mr. Arsenault said. 

That would be enough, but getting there will take widespread adoption – and customers – from places like Georgia. 

“To me, money is credibility and resilience and the ability to do more.”

Learn more at blackarcs.org and engage with the Pendleton Group at www.pendletonatlanta.com.