The Barcelona Metropolitan Area is formed by 36 municipalities, totaling 3.4 million inhabitants and 636 sq km. It is a diverse territory, with large cities as Barcelona (1.7 million) or l’Hospitalet de Llobregat (280,000), down to small towns with roughly 3,000 inhabitants. As a result, municipalities have very different capacities when it comes to offering cartographic information, creating inequalities within the metropolitan territory. Equally, we have observed that architects and engineers increasingly use BIM for their projects, but do not have easy access to accurate cartographies and bases to contextualize their designs.

The BIM cartography project wants to ensure that the whole metropolitan area has equal, high-quality, and openly accessible cartography. By doing so, the project wants to foster a wide set of goals. First is offering a better understanding of the context for building and public space projects, so that designers can use the BIM models as a basis for their projects, thus allowing for better designs and spaces. Second is promoting the connection of BIM information and GIS cartographies, which can allow for a more accurate 3d analysis of projects. Third is ensuring data interoperability, allowing for 3d data to be combined with other datasets as land registry, to create more accurate analysis that can help with emergency and disaster preparedness, among others. And more generally, the project wants to widen the possibilities for territorial analysis and design, by offering information in a public and easily accessible manner.

This project for transforming 1:1,000 scale territorial topographic cartography for use in BIM has been pioneering in Spain, and this strategic vision has allowed us to:

1. Create and chair a Subcommittee on GIS-BIM information exchange within the Spanish Standardization Association (UNE). The objective of this committee is to create a national standard for GIS-BIM information exchange, so that other public administrations can replicate the AMB case.

2. Lead regional and national working groups to ensure that topographic cartography data models from the GIS world can be integrated and utilized in BIM.

The project gives continuity to preexisting work in cartography and brings it to a new level of accuracy and interoperability. Based on existing 3D GIS vector cartography (points, lines and polygons), the first step was to build a 3D model (surfaces and volumes) for the whole territory, which was shared under eight different formats (DGN, DWG, GLB, SHP, KMZ, PDF, SKP, OBJ)

In early 2021, we achieved 100% coverage of the metropolitan territory at 1:1,000 detail, allowing us to do beta tests of converting the existing 3D model into BIM-IFC format.

In 2022, we created a public space cartography, offering sidewalk and roadways geometries for the whole metropolitan territory.

And in 2023, we leveraged our previous experience in generating 3D models in the GIS world to transform the 3D geometries and map them to the IFC schema data model so they could be consumed by the BIM domain.

Additionally, in some use cases of the territory’s BIM models in IFC, we have added metadata from the GIS world, such as the cadastral reference, the buildings’ construction date, the date of the cartography’s aerial survey, etc.

Since then, the project has continued to improve how datasets are shared and explore new applications and possibilities. In February 2024, the IFC model was reviewed in order to create new attributes and improve geometries. And in late 2024, we started to create urban planning and zoning cartography in IFC, so that building information and zoning information are both available in IFC and can be compared and analyzed together.

This project has been managed entirely internally by the Department of Cartographic Innovation Projects and our institution’s BIM Office. The initial data source consisted exclusively of the Metropolitan Topographic Map at a 1:1,000 scale.

The generation of the territory’s BIM models has been carried out entirely with internal technical resources.

However, these 3D models could be created because the Metropolitan Topographic Map exists, a living and sustainable project over time, thanks to the inter-administrative collaboration of the AMB with the Cartographic and Geological Institute of Catalonia and the Barcelona Provincial Council.

The approximate annual cost for updating the Metropolitan Topographic Map is around 1 million euros. It should be noted that achieving full coverage of all 36 municipalities that make up the AMB takes four years.

The project has garnered great success, and the information is being widely used. Between March 2023 and November 2025, 23,000 downloads of the BIM-IFC model took place. 

We have dashboards that allow us to analyze the types of users downloading the territory’s BIM models in IFC, and the main metrics reveal that:

• Professionals from the private and academic sectors lead the downloads of this product.
• The public sector is not yet mature enough to integrate this product into municipal management.
• Software companies attempting to develop applications to connect the GIS and BIM worlds have shown great interest in this product, to verify whether their technological platforms support the entire territorial cartography in IFC.
• Architects and other professionals involved in building and civil engineering are the users who demand this product the most.
• Regarding gender equity, the downloads are predominantly made by males.

In addition, this product has made it possible to bring official topographic cartography closer to the AECO sector, allowing it to be used as contextual cartography in building and infrastructure projects. This was impossible before this product was generated for consumption in BIM.

Yet most importantly, the project has been a cornerstone in IFC standardisation. It is allowing to homogenize how geographic information is transformed created in BIM and ensuring interoperability between different territories.

This project has had a very positive impact by fostering collaboration between public administrations and replicating the steps of the AMB, which continues to lead the digital vision of the territory.

The main barrier for this product has been the need to create a multidisciplinary team composed of GIS and BIM experts in order to understand how to map the data models from both worlds and facilitate their use with the end user at the center.

It is necessary to have professional profiles with extensive knowledge in process automation using ETL tools as well as programming languages such as Python.

The lack of maturity of the software used by professionals working in BIM (whether viewers or modeling programs) also represents a significant challenge when testing the territory’s BIM-IFC models. We have identified different behavior in loading and reading the same models across different programs.

The IFC schema (with its different versions, 2x3, 4.3, 5, etc.) is not designed for territorial data but for building and infrastructure data, which complicates faithful mapping of data models from the GIS world using the BIM methodology.

In addition, organizational and political support to the project has happened in a gradual way, gaining traction to move from initial skepticism to full support.

The main success of this project has been leveraging all the official cartography generated by the public administration, which was previously only used in GIS environments, so that it can now be utilized with the BIM methodology. This allows for multiple checks and additional uses beyond those previously possible, as until now the territory had not been modeled in BIM.

This project has paved the way for the standardization and normalization of transforming territorial topographic cartography for integration into BIM. All administrations at the regional and national levels are working to standardize this integration. It has generated a movement of cooperation and collaboration between the GIS and BIM communities (at both regional and national levels) which will allow further progress in this field and encourage administrations to incorporate technical professional profiles that support this integration.

In Catalonia, thanks to having a consensual data model for the production of topographic cartography, this project can be quickly scaled to the entire regional territory.

Monteagudo, Montserrat. ‘Modelos BIM Del Área Metropolitana de Barcelona’. Blog IDEE, 21 April 2023. https://blog-idee.blogspot.com/2023/04/modelos-bim-del-area-metropolitana-de.html.

Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona. ‘BIM portal’ .https://bim.amb.cat/ 

Àrea Metropolitana de Barcelona. ‘Cartography Geoportal’. https://geoportalcartografia.amb.cat/AppGeoportalCartografia2/?Categoria=Models3D&Producte=57