Analyzing Building Permit Processes Across Europe

The issuance of building permits is a critical process for urban development, ensuring compliance with legal standards and sustainability goals. This process presents a complex web of processes, regulations, and methodologies in Europe. Despite its importance in shaping urban landscapes, detailed investigations into the building permitting process have yet to be limited [1,2]. This knowledge gap obstructs optimizing these processes and curtails the potential for digital transformation, a crucial step in updating administrative functions. A study conducted by members of EU4DBP aims to address this deficiency by conducting a comparative analysis of building permitting processes in 19 European countries. The goal is to lay a foundation for enhancing process efficiency and fostering a comprehensive European perspective. The insights from this study are expected to contribute to developing more effective policies and encourage the creation of improved solutions and practices in building permits. Our study adopts a multifaceted methodological approach to conduct a comparative analysis of the building permitting processes. The primary objective is to unearth commonalities and variations across different regions, thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of the intricacies involved in the permitting process. The methodology comprises several key phases: data collection, data preparation, data analysis, and validation processes. The data collection phase is centered around conducting interviews with individuals who are experts in the field of building permits, primarily employed in municipalities across Europe. These interviews are designed to extract detailed, qualitative data regarding the various processes, regulations, and practices of issuing building permits. A standardized guideline was developed based on prior research and studies to maintain consistency and quality across all interviews. This ensured that the data collected was reliable and comparable across different municipalities. Once the data was collected, it entered the data preparation phase. Here, the focus was transcribing the interviews and organizing the information to facilitate efficient analysis. The transcription process is meticulous, ensuring the qualitative data is accurately captured and ready for analysis. This phase is crucial as it lays the groundwork for the subsequent analysis, forming the backbone of the research. In the data analysis phase, a qualitative approach is adopted. The transcribed texts are scrutinized using a shared coding scheme. This coding scheme is designed to identify key themes, patterns, and variations within the data. One of the unique aspects of our analysis is the use of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0 standard, as seen in Figure 1. This standard allows us to create generalized maps for each municipality’s process, visually representing the building permitting processes and highlighting the similarities and differences across various regions.