Building information modelling for urban land administration

© 2016 Dr Behnam AtazadehOver the last decades, rapid urbanization has resulted in unprecedented pressure on development and use of land in cities around the world, proliferating multi-storey buildings as well as other urban infrastructure facilities. This means that urban built environments are becoming more and more spatially complex. Urban land administration mainly refers to the information and processes required for recording and managing legal interests in multi-storey building developments, in which a community of owners hold their distinct private, communal, and public legal interests. In multi-storey building developments, the spatial extent of legal interests is often outlined as three-dimensional (3D), invisible, multi-layered and complex volumetric spaces. Currently, urban land administration practices mainly rely on 2D-based analogue subdivision plans to define boundaries of legal interests. These plans are recognized as posing a range of challenges in terms of communicating and managing the spatial complexity associated with various legal interests defined inside and around multi-storey buildings. In response to these challenges, 3D digital models are being investigated as a potential approach for managing complex, vertically stratified legal arrangements. In this research, the feasibility of a widely used 3D modelling approach in the architecture and construction industry – Building Information Modelling (BIM) – was investigated for the 3D digital management of legal interests in multi-storey building developments. BIM provides a common and 3D digital data sharing space, underpinning a reliable basis for facilitating collaboration and decision making over the lifecycle of buildings. However, legal attributes and spatial structure of legal arrangements inside and around buildings are yet to be accommodated within the BIM data environment. Therefore, a range of data elements required for managing legal information has been elicited by investigating current practices pertaining to subdivision of legal interests within multi-storey building developments in Victoria, Australia. An open data model in the BIM domain – Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) – was extended with these legal data elements and a prototype BIM model for a multi-story building development was implemented to demonstrate the viability of the extended IFC data model for 3D digital management and visualization of data related to complex legal arrangements. To validate the extended IFC data model, three assessments were conducted. In the first assessment, land administration experts and IFC specialists reviewed the extended data model in terms of its information completeness and logical validity. In the second assessment, the prototype BIM model was compared with its 2D plan version, and benefits and obstacles of using a BIM-driven approach for urban land administration were discussed. Final assessment includes the comparison between the prototype BIM model, which is an integrated legal and physical model, and its purely legal and purely physical models using some objective metrics. These metrics include number of objects and geometry batches, visualization speed in terms of frame rate, query time, modelling the spatial structure of legal interests, modelling legal boundaries, and visual communication of legal boundaries