Helping Cities Choose Well, and Deliver
Two companies, founded by people who have run cities, advised them, and built the technology they use.
What We Do
TWO COMPANIES, THREE BUSINESSES
Cities are asked to do more than their budgets allow, and to justify every choice long after it is made. We work on both halves of that problem: helping the people who make the decisions, and building the tools that make the reasoning defensible.
Our Vision: A world in which every city makes rigorous decisions to better serve its people.
TOP URBAN
Top Urban advises cities, drawing on the specialized expertise of former mayors and urban practitioners, and supports the development of the institutional capabilities needed to deliver a vision, including urban leadership development.
TOP URBAN AI
Top Urban AI develops and operates the AI tools and platforms that help cities prioritize their investments and deliver successful smart urban projects, in partnership with trusted solution providers — with reasoning a city can defend long after the decision is made.
AI-native, Not AI-added
Most firms have added AI to what they already did. A consultancy puts an AI model on top of a pyramid of juniors. A training provider generates slides faster. A software vendor bolts a chatbot onto an existing product.
All three of our businesses were built the other way round: designed from the start around what a model can do, with the human-in-the-loop role defined deliberately.
Advisory — the team is composed, not staffed.
A traditional firm sells leverage: a pyramid of juniors under a partner, with margin coming from the ratio between them. Layering AI onto that pyramid makes the old process faster. It does not change it.
Top Urban Advisory is built around agent teams instead. Agents do the first-order work; a small human core orchestrates and signs. What that changes is not speed but structure.
Diagnostic agent swarm
Competing problem framings run in parallel over city data, plans and budgets, rather than one framing chosen early and followed to the end.
Composed teams
Teams built to the cognitive demands of each problem, not assembled from who is available at what seniority.
Standing challenger agents
Counter-hypotheses and pre-mortems generated continuously. Dissent is designed in, not left to one partner's judgment.
Always-on engagement
Agents monitor the KPIs a city committed to, between steering meetings. Not a report delivered and an exit.
Guardrails: every deliverable carries an AI-use appendix and a named human owner, agent outputs are verified against primary sources, and high-consequence decisions are never fully automated.
Executive development — designed by mayors, taught by urban professionals.
Most executive programs are filmed once and taught for years. The case studies age, the regulation moves, and nobody refilms a former mayor to fix it.
Former mayors and urban practitioners design our curriculum, review every module and record the case studies. Named facilitators run the live sessions. AI does the production — drafted from a single controlled source, expert-reviewed, and signed off by a named person before release.
Designed by practitioners
Former mayors and urban practitioners write the curriculum, review every module and record the case studies.
AI-produced, expert-reviewed
No module published without named human sign-off.
Assessed by people
No grade and no completion decision is automated.
Top Urban Capacity Development uses AI to reducee the cost of production and allows us to offer the program in multiple languages. It does not reduce the human accountability for what is taught or how it is assessed.
The platform — the reasoning is the product.
Top Urban AI, a sister company sharing our founders, builds the urban intelligence platform. It scores smart city project proposals against criteria a city sets and weights, shows the reasoning behind every ranking, and records where officers override the model and why.
Every score is pinned to a model version, so a decision can be reproduced years later. That is the difference between a tool a city can adopt and one its legal function will stop.
One evidence base, three businesses.
What the platform learns from cities sharpens the advice and refreshes the curriculum. What the advisory sees in the field becomes case material for the program. What program participants decide, back in their own cities, is the demand the platform was built to serve.
Three businesses across two companies, drawing on one evidence base. No single-product competitor has that loop, and it is the reason we can price access the way we do.
In all three, the same limit applies. Machines draft; people choose. The decision, and the authority, stay with the city.
Five Things Only Top Urban Can Say
Mayors on the inside, not on an advisory board
Two former mayors are among our founders. They teach the programs, sign the advice and open the doors themselves.
AI-native from inception, not AI-retrofitted
Our advisory was designed around agents as team members, not chatbots layered onto an advisory pyramid.
Transparent about every interest
Advisory is scoped to policy and strategy, not implementation. Where a recommendation touches an interest of either company, we disclose it.
One evidence base across all three businesses
What the platform learns sharpens the advice and refreshes the curriculum. No point solution can copy that loop.
Built for every city, not only the best-resourced
Our income-tiered pricing and adaptable methods give committed, emerging-market cities access to the same rigorous urban expertise as OECD capitals.
Who Is Behind It
Hazem Galal
Chief Executive Officer
Led a Big Four firm's global cities and local government practice for two decades and co-led its smart mobility initiative, working from Abu Dhabi, Rio de Janeiro, Doha and Dubai.
Mauricio Rodas
Co-founder
Former Mayor of Quito, Ecuador, and an advocate for urban innovation internationally. Has made city investment decisions from inside city hall and lived with the consequences.
Jan Vapaavuori
Co-founder
Former Mayor of Helsinki and former Finnish Minister of Economic Affairs. Has run public procurement in one of the most tightly regulated environments in the world.
Akif Kamal
Chief Technology Officer, Top Urban AI
TOP URBAN AI
Previously co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of an explainable artificial intelligence company acquired by Apple.
Get In Touch
For advisory work, the executive program, or the platform — write to us.
AI Centre, 12th floor, Uptown Tower P O Box 337780 Dubai, United Arab Emirates