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Barcelona wants to speed up building permits with artificial intelligence
Applying for a building permit in Barcelona could soon stop being one of those procedures that drag on for months. The Ayuntamiento and the Generalitat have launched a collaboration to digitalise urban planning management and reduce the bottlenecks that delay renovations, refurbishments, and new housing projects.
The initiative brings together the City Council, the Generalitat, the I2CAT foundation and the Centre de Telecomunicacions i Tecnologies de la Informació. Its aim is to test how artificial intelligence and digital building models can help review projects more quickly, with greater traceability and less paperwork.
The change is significant in a city where housing has become a daily urgency. Every licence that gets held up can delay a development, a renovation or a necessary refurbishment in older buildings. Streamlining these processes does not create housing by itself, but it can remove part of the administrative brake.
The first step will be to identify at which stages of the procedure artificial intelligence can be useful. The idea is not to replace technical or legal work all at once, but to identify repetitive tasks, regulatory checks and points in the file where a digital tool can organise information better.
The other key element will be the use of BIM, a methodology that makes it possible to work with digital building models and cross-reference technical, construction and regulatory data. Instead of reviewing only plans and scattered documents, the administration will be able to check part of the project through a more complete digital representation.
The pilot will also adapt the open-source BIMRocket tool to automatically validate planning requirements and generate incident reports. Tests will be carried out using real but anonymised projects to determine whether the system can detect errors or incompatibilities before the file becomes blocked.
The agreement will initially last two years, with the possibility of an extension. I2CAT will lead the BIM-related part, the CTTI will be responsible for artificial intelligence, the Generalitat will coordinate the project and the City Council will provide information and cases for the pilot tests.
The promise is ambitious: fewer waits, fewer opaque steps and a clearer relationship between citizens, technicians, architects and the administration. If it works, Barcelona could begin to change one of the city’s least visible but most decisive elements: the time that passes between submitting a project and being able to turn it into real construction work.