Why I'm Building Tapak

For most of the past decade I worked as an advocate for sustainable urban mobility across Southeast Asia. I made the case for cities that lean less on their cars, I advised city governments, and I helped bring shared mobility services to Cyberjaya, Penang, Shah Alam, Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Singapore. The work was really about shaping how cities think about movement, and convincing the people who plan them that better streets are worth the trouble.

One lesson from those years has stuck with me. The hardest part of building a low carbon city isn’t ambition. It’s the first read. Before anyone commissions a study, files a plan, or sits down with a planner, they need a rough, honest answer to a simple question: given where this site sits, what does low carbon even look like here?

Today that first read takes weeks. It shouldn’t.

What Tapak is

Tapak is the Malay word for site, or footprint. It’s a tool I’m building to give a preliminary low carbon reading of a Malaysian site from something as simple as an uploaded map screenshot. You show it where you’re looking, confirm the locality, and it returns a short reading aligned to the LCCF. It’s the sort of directional answer that helps a developer, a planner, or a community group decide whether an idea is worth taking further.

Two principles aren’t up for negotiation, and they’re the reason I’m building this carefully instead of quickly.

The first is that Tapak stays preliminary and never official. It isn’t an MGTC LCCF assessment, a certification, or a Diamond rating, and it never pretends to be. Every output is indicative, a starting point for a conversation with a qualified planner rather than a replacement for one.

The second is that Tapak is reference only, and it always shows its sources. It doesn’t scrape or redistribute government planning data. It points you to the gazetted plan, names it, and links you to PLANMalaysia’s I-Plan so you can check everything against the official record yourself.

If that sounds like a lot of caution for something this early, it is. Working with cities taught me that trust is the whole product. A tool that overstates what it knows is worse than no tool at all.

Why me, and why now

I’m not a planner and I’ve never claimed to be. What I am is someone who spent years arguing for low carbon cities, then grew tired of waiting for the tools that would make the case. So I started building them myself.

Somewhere along the way I taught myself to ship software. These days I design and run production systems from start to finish. One of them is an internal project and resource platform called the Core, which a real team relies on every day, with an AI chat layer sitting on top of live operational data. Building it showed me exactly what today’s models can and can’t be trusted to do, and where a careful, tightly bounded assistant genuinely earns its place.

Tapak is where the two halves of my work finally meet. There’s the advocate who spent years making the case for low carbon urban development in Malaysia, and there’s the builder who knows how to put a vision model behind a hard wall that verifies before it trusts.

Where it’s at

Tapak is early. The landing page, the data model, the report template and the reliability tests already exist. The core piece, turning a screenshot into a report, is the part I’m building now, and I’m doing it in the open. I’ll write here as I go: what works, what I get wrong, and what I learn about building AI you can actually trust in a regulated, high stakes field.

If you work in planning, sustainability, or property in Malaysia and any of this resonates, I’d genuinely like to hear from you, whether you’d use it, want to pressure test it, or think I’ve got something wrong.

Follow along as I build Tapak, or reach me at tapak@motiondigest.com.

Johan Sammy