An Investigation of Construction Permit and Building Use Permit Processes in Municipalities: A Mutual Interview Study

Bir Karşılıklı Görüşme Çalışması

Abstract

The regulation in which the task definitions of municipalities are drawn is the Turkish Planned Areas Zoning Regulation in the building production process in Turkey. The regulation aims to determine the standards of a building according to plans, science, health, and sustainable environmental conditions. Relevant authorities’ crucial task in the regulation is to give project permits following regulation to contractors operating in the Turkish private sector to build construction projects appropriately. Among the permits required from the relevant authorities are the Construction Permit (required for the start of the construction project) and the Building Use Permit (which is required for the residence permit after completion of the construction project). All of the buildings are audited throughout the process by the public and some statutory auditing tools. Many of these audits are known to be carried out by local governments. However, it has been revealed in many studies that there is no standard in the date of legal inspection processes by municipalities, and different municipalities inspect differently. In this study, mutual interviews were held with the personnel responsible for the construction permit and the building use permit processes in Uskudar, Atasehir, Kadikoy, Besiktas, Sisli, and Zeytinburnu municipalities (all of which have a higher population and housing density than many other districts in Istanbul) to determine the teams’ status in both processes, to create the workflow charts of these processes, to analyze the problems in the processes, and to give solutions to the problems. Nine mutual interviews with six different municipalities were recorded with the permission of the personnel working in the Zoning and Urban Planning Directorate and the Building Control Directorate. The mutual interview method was applied with the municipal personnel involved in the construction permit and the building use permit processes in this study. The mutual interview is a data collection technique through verbal communication. This method is generally done face-to-face. The basis of the mutual interview is based on the mutual conversation of two parties. Therefore, there are at least two parties in this method. One of them is the interviewer, and the other is the interviewee (source person). The interviewer asks the questions with the permission of the interviewee. Then, he/she completes the interview by recording the answers of the interviewee. This study conducted nine mutual interviews with Uskudar, Atasehir, Kadikoy, Besiktas, Sisli, and Zeytinburnu Municipalities to present the general situation of the construction permit and the building use permit processes by the municipalities in Istanbul. The municipalities do not have information about the academic and private-sector studies that minimize the problems encountered in the construction permit and building use permit processes, facilitate the processes, and ensure standardization of processes. They want to support innovative studies at technical universities both financially and technically. It will be beneficial for Turkey to integrate the digital archive work with a single package of software, create solutions for municipalities in Istanbul, and then use it throughout Turkey. The construction permit process is completed in an average of 24 days, and the building use permit process is completed in an average of 50 days. The lack of a standard for the process steps of the construction permit and the building use permit, causing problems for the project stakeholders due to the process steps, different implementations of the process steps by the municipalities, loss of time due to the repetitive processes, loss of environmental waste, and cost losses are common problems encountered in all municipalities. Municipalities require the transition to a legal electronic document management system. It has been proposed to prepare and implement a new regulation that re-handles, standardizes, and updates the construction permit and building use permit processes. At the end of the mutual interviews, valuable comments were put forward as part of the additional answers given to the questions by the municipality personnel. It will be beneficial for the municipality personnel to update themselves and follow the current regulations if the regulations undergo a few changes. For this reason, most of the problems will be solved with the innovative studies supported by the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization in Turkey.