The Lisbon City Council (CML) is working to, even in 2020, “be able to start with the Digital Urbanism project”. This means that the processes for urban licensing are now completely dematerialized and that applicants are able to follow from the internet the concrete situation of their processes, the information and opinions that are being produced.

The speeding up of the licensing processes that reach the local authority is, moreover, one of the measures most requested by the players in the real estate sector, namely by the promoters. The project will reduce the consumption of interaction time with our services and, on the other hand, allows users of urban planning services to have real-time information about what is happening.

According to Ricardo Veludo, the Digital Urbanism project will also “create better working conditions for CML technicians”, freeing them “from a series of bureaucratic tasks that do not create value”. “Not only will the system be more transparent, but it will also be much faster, because we will have people with technical capacity to analyze the freest processes to dedicate themselves to this work and less to administrative or bureaucratic functions that do not create value”.

“[With the Digital Urbanism project] the processes for urban licensing are now completely dematerialized and applicants are able to follow from the internet the concrete situation of their processes, the information and opinions that are being produced”
Ricardo Veludo

The councilor responsible for urban planning recognizes that Lisbon has lived in the last four, five years “a period of intense dynamism in the real estate sector that was not accompanied by the reinforcement of human resources in urban planning services”. “Nor has there been any evolution from the technological point of view in the ways of working in licensing, so this is a central priority for 2020”, that is, having “Digital Urbanism working as soon as possible”, he says.

“The focus is to be up to the dynamism of cities and to be able to make decisions in good time, and for that reason to have greater predictability about the development conditions of each real estate project,” he says.

Transparency is the Keyword.

According to the councilor and former coordinator of the mission team of the Renda Acessível Program, who spoke to the idealist / news on the sidelines of the event “MEET UP Lisbon – A city to invest”, it is crucial to have transparency in the relationship between CML and various actors in the real estate sector and with residents, Lisbon citizens.

“One of the aspects in which we have the possibility to improve a lot is in the way we communicate the fundamentals of decisions, whether to approve or not a certain project”
Ricardo Veludo

“The issue of transparency is fundamental, because it matches with another very important word that is trust. One of the aspects in which we have the possibility to improve a lot is in the way we communicate the fundamentals of decisions, whether to approve or not a certain project. And we have to do it in an intelligible and clear way, not only for those who presented the project at CML, but also for all citizens who are interested in knowing the reasons for its approval or not ”, he acknowledges.

For Ricardo Veludo, it is equally important to have transparency in the way the municipality organizes public discussions and public debates about major urban and real estate projects. “We have to be able to structure the information that is relevant in a more intelligible, more infographed way, so that people who are not specialists can understand it and do not have this feeling that sometimes exists of distrust, because it is very much related to a lack of understanding reasons. We have to do more than just provide the entire administrative process for each project ”, he concludes.

Source: Idealista

April 16, 2020