Urban planning and digital building permitting typically operate within separate silos, with zoning intent mostly embedded in documents and not directly usable within automated digital building permitting. This study addresses the discontinuity between document-based land use planning and information-model-based building design and permitting by proposing the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)-based Spatial Planning Information Model (SPIM) as a structured, machine-interpretable baseline used across planning, participation and building permitting workflows. To address the identified problem, this study is organized according to Action Design Research methodology. SPIM is specified as an IFC-based representation of zoning conditions, and the results show how controlled authoring conventions, template-based semantics and publication in municipal geospatial environments enable traceable reuse beyond the authoring tool. The demonstrations indicate that planning, participation, building permitting workflows and early-stage environmental analyses can be integrated for decision support. Simultaneously, the study provides novel evidence that technology is not the only barrier to adoption, as operationalization depends on societal and institutional readiness, including data governance, accountability for maintaining authoritative inputs and transparent outputs with agreed review and dispute-resolution procedures. The study concludes by listing the implications for municipalities and standardization, including short-term profiling and a longer-term case for explicit planning-domain concepts in open standards.
Raitviir et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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