Project Release Date 15.01.2022
The bot is a tool for searching and monitoring construction documentation, which helps to find information about the current state of historical buildings in Kyiv.
How can one understand that a historic building is in danger? There are obvious signs of a fire, a construction fence, or special equipment on the site. These indicate a critical threat and require an immediate response from the community and city authorities.
Reitarska str, 33, old building demolishing. Source: facebook.com/AmiDPerov
There are other, less obvious signs of danger, such as the city council's decision to transfer the land plot for development, city-planning conditions, and restrictions or permits for construction works obtained by the developer.
The sooner the threat is detected, the more time the community has for careful consideration, publicity, and organization of building protection. It ultimately increases the chances of saving a historical building.
How do you get the information necessary for timely reaction and protection of valuable architecture? We created a chatbot for this.
@MapaMistobot is a tool for searching and monitoring construction documentation. It can provide information about the current state of historical buildings in Kyiv. The bot aggregates data from open registers and allows users to search for them by address.
Bot's UI
Where does the data come from?
The bot aggregates open and semi-open data and registers.
The Kyiv City Council Decisions
Source: Official website of the Kyiv City Council
Why it's useful? The documents of the City Council decisions may contain information about leasing a land plot under a historical building to developers.
Urban planning conditions and restrictions
Source: Register of Urban Planning Conditions and Restrictions (starting from 2017).
Why it's useful? It contains constraints for developers and construction e.g. building's height constraints, requirements for handling existing and neighbouring buildings etc.
Construction permission documents
Source: The Register of Construction Activities (from 2012)
Why it's useful? It contains the government's permits for construction, the class of construction, notifications on the start of construction etc.
❗Disclaimer. During the martial law, the registers are mostly closed; we don't know whether they're updated thoroughly. That's why the bot database has also not been updated since February 2022.
Bot functions
Search by address
A user can enter any Kyiv address and see whether some construction documents are issued for this address.
Search by address (the bot supports only Ukrainian)
Building's monitoring
The user can create monitoring at a specific address within Kyiv. In this case, the bot will notify the user when new data related to this address appears. Some registers are closed during martial law, so this function is limited. We will resume regular registry parsing as soon as they reopen.
A list of created monitorings (the bot supports only Ukrainian)
What's next?
The first step is to restore automatic and regular data updating from open sources. First, we plan to set up the Kyiv City Council website parser to upload new and existing project solutions regularly.
The second step is to restore the automatic collection of construction and construction permits as soon as the closed registers are opened.
By the way, if you know how to program in Python and want to help with this, write to us at map.future.renovation@google.com. Also, please write to us if you have some interesting ideas for improving the data collection needed to save architectural heritage.
The service was created in 2021 as part of the project "In Search of Abandoned Podil," implemented by the organization within the "3D Project: Development despite obstacles. Sustainable civil society during the pandemic and in the future", which was carried out by the Eastern Europe Foundation with the financial support of the European Union.