Building a Platform for Place

Every city has a voice. But too often, that voice gets drowned out by generic travel content, corporate narratives, and Wikipedia summaries. citypal is not just a tour app—it is a platform for preserving, amplifying, and sharing the authentic stories that make places matter.

The Problem: Homogenized Travel Content

Walk into any tourist district and you will hear the same stories, read the same plaques, and follow the same routes. Travel content has become commodified—copy-pasted across apps, stripped of personality, optimized for SEO instead of soul.

Meanwhile, locals who know the real stories—the grandma who runs the corner bakery, the historian who spent decades researching forgotten neighborhoods, the artist painting murals in back alleys—go unheard.

A Platform, Not Just an App

From the beginning, we designed citypal as more than a consumer app. It is a platform for place—a way to document, preserve, and share local knowledge in a format that scales globally but stays rooted in community.

Here is how it works:

1. Co-Creation with Locals

We do not scrape the internet and call it a day. We work with historians, cultural organizations, storytellers, and long-time residents to co-create content. They share their knowledge, we help them structure and distribute it.

This means every city in our network has stewards—people who maintain the accuracy, depth, and authenticity of the stories being told.

2. Preservation of Oral Histories

Many of the best stories about a place are not written down. They are passed through generations, told in cafés, shared among friends. We are working to record these oral histories before they disappear.

Imagine walking through a neighborhood and hearing the story directly from someone who lived through it—delivered through AI narration that preserves their voice, cadence, and personality.

3. Economic Support for Communities

Content creators on citypal get paid. Local historians, tour guides, and storytellers earn revenue when travelers engage with their content. This creates a sustainable model where sharing local knowledge becomes economically viable.

Instead of extractive tourism—where big tech takes stories and gives nothing back—we build a system where communities benefit directly.

Beyond Tourism: Civic Memory

Cities are not just tourist destinations. They are living communities with complex histories, ongoing struggles, and evolving identities. A platform for place has a responsibility to capture all of that—not just the sanitized, tourist-friendly version.

This means:

• Telling uncomfortable truths: Acknowledging histories of colonialism, displacement, and injustice.
• Elevating marginalized voices: Ensuring that stories from underrepresented communities are heard.
• Documenting change: Capturing neighborhoods in transition before they disappear.

The Open Knowledge Model

We believe that local knowledge should be open, accessible, and community-owned. That is why citypal operates on an open knowledge model:

• Data belongs to contributors: Storytellers retain ownership of their content.
• Transparent revenue sharing: We publish exactly how money flows from travelers to creators.
• No paywalling local knowledge: Core historical and cultural content is free for locals—we monetize the AI experience layer, not the stories themselves.

Challenges Ahead

Building a platform for place is not easy. We face real challenges:

• Trust: Communities have been burned by extractive tech. We have to earn trust through action, not promises.
• Scale vs. authenticity: As we grow, how do we maintain quality without centralizing control?
• Language barriers: Stories exist in hundreds of languages. Translation is necessary, but must preserve cultural nuance.
• Economic sustainability: Can we generate enough revenue to support contributors without becoming exploitative?

These are hard problems. But they are worth solving.

Join the Movement

If you are a local historian, tour guide, storyteller, or community organizer, we want to work with you. citypal is built with communities, not for them.

Together, we can create a future where every city has a voice—and that voice is heard by the world.