Up until now the process of submitting plans to the Cape Town city council has been fraught with difficulties. It typically involved submitting 4 sets of coloured in plans and lugging these back and forth from council when and if they needed to be amended. Most times council lost some of the consultants plans and we had to charge our clients for disbursements 3 times over for council’s failure to keep track of the plans.
Now the Cape Town city council are introducing a digital submission process called the Development Application Management System (DAMS). This system is an attempt to standardise the processing of Development Applications and to ensure visibility and transparency at every step of the process (we hope!). DAMS is hoped to take council into the “digital generation”. They have taken about 2 years to develop the system and it kicks off on the 1st April 2014.
It means that submissions, where they used to consist of hard copies, will now consist of pdf’s on a flash drive. It will be very interesting to see how council will handle this – it is slightly nerve wracking to embark on a new process but at the same time it is commendable that they are trying to keep up to date with the latest technologies in the industry. Time will tell!
If you need more information on DAMS then go to the City of Cape Town website.
Article originally on www.peerutinarchitects.co.za