GeoBIM for Urban Sustainability Measuring: A State-of-the-Art in Building Permit Issuance

The integration of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Building Information Modelling (BIM) has shown promising applications in different sectors related to urban transformation and at various scales, ranging from the district to the building level. This approach, also known as GeoBIM, presents opportunities and challenges for assessing urban indicators, with both technical and social implications. This paper aims to define the state-of-the-art and to explore the possibilities opened by GeoBIM for urban transformation measurement, with a focus on planning and building permits issuance. Accordingly, a literature and project review is conducted, to better understand the challenges and potential of GeoBIM. The results show that there are still technical problems to be addressed (e.g., data acquisition approaches and interoperability). Moreover, further research can be directed at the social implications of GeoBIM in practice, including updating political and cultural frameworks, enhancing competencies, and rethinking conventional practices from digitalization to re-coding processes.