The Official College of Architects of Córdoba (COACo) has expressed its interest in expanding the existing collaboration agreement with the Municipal Urban Planning Board (GMU) of Córdoba City Council. This agreement, which has been in place for a year and a half to expedite urban planning license processing, has yielded positive results, and the professional body now seeks to broaden its scope.
Initially, the agreement focused on reducing the processing times for licenses for urban development projects within the city. However, COACo aims to go further in this collaboration. Firstly, it will request to assume new responsibilities, such as processing provisional certifications for protected housing (VPO), alignments, and gradients, as well as issuing Assimilated to Out-of-Order (AFO) reports.
The AFO report is a municipal technical document that administratively regularizes buildings constructed without a license. It recognizes constructions for which the legal deadline for demolition or sanction has expired, granting them legal certainty and access to basic services. It is important to note that this recognition does not legalize the dwelling.
Secondly, the College is working to establish agreements with other municipalities in the province of Córdoba that also need to expedite urban planning license processing. The objective is to extend this collaboration model both in duration and across the entire provincial territory.
The Mayor of Córdoba, José María Bellido, recently praised the effectiveness of this approach, stating in an interview that the agreement with architects and other professional colleges has been highly beneficial. He recalled that last year, 300 licenses were processed through this mechanism, reducing the average processing time from six to two months.
During the year and a half of the agreement's operation, COACo has received nearly 344 urban development project files. Of these, 174 applications have already received the mandatory report from technicians, while the rest are undergoing correction, supervision, or have just been submitted. Of the 174 reported cases, over a hundred have received a favorable report, allowing the GMU to grant the corresponding license to commence construction, with 106 projects now having an urban planning license.
