What if Sesimbra approved building permits in weeks?

When waiting stops being normal

Anyone who has submitted a building project to a city council knows the ritual: submit, wait, a request for more documents, resubmit, wait again. Months pass between the first application and the permit in hand. And on the other side of the counter, skilled staff spend too much time searching for files, copying data between systems and answering “where is my application?”.

A municipality like Sesimbra, under strong development and tourism pressure, between the coast and the Arrábida natural park, receives applications that require technical opinions, external consultations and compliance with demanding environmental rules. The problem is rarely a lack of competence: it is a lack of tools that keep up with the pace.

This article starts from a hypothetical but plausible case: what would happen if Sesimbra City Council used a low-code platform to redesign its services, starting with project approval, where waiting weighs most on citizens?

I write from my experience as a UX/UI Designer at S4 Digital, on modernisation projects for government entities in the Middle East and for insurance companies, where complex processes and sensitive data demand rigour. One lesson repeats itself every time: digitalising is not automating for the sake of automating. It is rethinking how people relate to the institution.

Low-code, without the jargon

Low-code is a way of building applications and workflows with little programming: dragging components, designing forms, defining rules (e.g. “if the project is in a protected ecological zone, request opinion X”) and connecting existing systems. What used to take months of custom development now takes weeks.

For a city council, this means three practical things:

• Speed: a new form or approval workflow can go live in days, not after years of procurement.
• Proximity: the people who know the process (the technician, the head of division) take part directly in designing the solution.
• Integration: the platform connects to what already exists (document management, GIS, accounting, the citizen portal) instead of replacing it.

Mendix (Siemens), OutSystems and Microsoft Power Apps are mature examples of this approach. But the tool is only half the equation. The other half is user experience (UX) design: it translates business rules and legal language into journeys anyone can understand.

When you design a permit application form, you are not just designing a screen. You are redesigning the relationship between the citizen and the Council. Good design reduces the applicant’s anxiety, builds trust and makes internal work more efficient.

Project approval: where time gets lost

Building permits are the perfect example. Portugal’s Urban Planning Simplex reform shortened deadlines and extended tacit approval, which increases the pressure on municipal services: if the council does not respond in time, it loses control of the decision. Responding faster is no longer just a matter of service quality.

In a typical process, most of the time is not technical review. It is dead time:

• files sitting idle awaiting a decision, with no one alerted;
• manual checks for missing documents, only detected weeks after submission;
• internal and external opinions requested by email, with no deadline control;
• staff answering phone calls about the status of applications.

With a low-code platform, the same workflow runs like this:

1. Guided online submission: the form adapts to the type of operation and blocks submission if mandatory documents are missing.
2. Automatic initial check: reading the documents, identifying the type of process and cross-referencing the location with GIS (municipal master plan, ecological and agricultural reserves, the Arrábida Natural Park, coastal zone), automatically identifying the opinions required.
3. Smart assignment: the file goes to the right technician, based on expertise and workload.
4. Parallel reviews: internal and external consultations sent at the same time, with deadlines tracked and alerts before they expire.
5. Decision and notification: the decision-maker sees a ready-made summary; the applicant is notified at every stage and gets an estimated timeline from day one.

The same platform can handle the department’s related tasks: on-site inspections with a mobile app, issuing permits and certificates, calculating fees, occupancy permits and complaint handling.

And when laws or regulations change, analysts adjust the rules in the platform itself and designers adapt the journeys. Workflows evolve with reality, without waiting for a new system.

Doing more with the same people

The strongest argument for low-code is not technological; it is about people. Municipalities struggle to hire and retain technical staff. Freeing those they have from repetitive work is the fastest way to increase capacity.

There are also less visible gains: less paper and printing, fewer transcription errors, a full history of every decision (useful for audits and litigation) and data to plan teams around real demand.

And the investment can be phased. Start with one process, measure it, then extend to other services: private construction works, use of public space, advertising licences, social support, incident management.

What changes for residents

For anyone applying for a permit, the difference is felt immediately: they know what to submit before submitting, and always know where their application stands.

Today’s citizens don’t just want access. They want predictability: knowing what stage their application is at, how long it will take and who is responsible.

• Transparency: real-time tracking, step by step, with the responsible officer identified and SMS or email alerts, like an online order.
• Fewer trips to the council: submission, fee payment, amendments and document collection, all digital.
• Fewer requests for additional documents: validation on submission avoids the back-and-forth that currently costs weeks.
• Predictable timelines: with parallel reviews and alerts, decision time shrinks and becomes estimable.
• A single channel: questions and notifications in one place, without depending on who answers the phone.

For architects, developers and local businesses, predictability is money. A municipality that approves quickly and well becomes more attractive for investing and for living.

On the inside, the same notifications feed the teams’ performance indicators. The information that reaches residents is the same information management sees. When citizens trust the system, they trust the institution.

No one left behind

Modernisation cannot forget those with lower digital literacy. According to ANACOM, Portugal’s communications regulator, in 2025 27.6% of the Portuguese population aged 16 to 74 had below-basic digital skills and 10.6% did not use the internet. The 2021 Census by INE, the national statistics institute, also recorded an illiteracy rate of 3.1%. On top of that, there are citizens with visual, motor or cognitive impairments.

In Sesimbra, as in the rest of the country, these are not exceptions. They are an essential part of the service, and the system must be designed for them from the start:

• Traditional channels, equally effective: whoever comes to the counter, phones or sends a letter enters the same digital workflow. Only the point of contact changes.
• Contact of the resident’s choosing: letter or phone instead of email, without losing track of the application.
• Authorised representative: a family member or trusted person can be designated as the point of contact for those with less autonomy.
• Accessibility: forms and portal designed for screen readers, large text and plain language.

Designing for citizens means designing for everyone, including those without a smartphone, email or internet access. It is an exercise in empathy and social responsibility, which means service improvements will always take these people into account.

Risks and first steps

Low-code is not magic. The risks are well known and manageable:

• Digitalising chaos: automating a badly designed process only makes it fail faster. Simplify first, then automate.
• Scattered applications: without governance, each department builds its own solution. A reference team and common rules are needed.
• Vendor lock-in: choose platforms with exportable data and integration based on open standards.
• Data protection and security: GDPR, data hosting and access control defined from the start.
• Resistance to change: change is cultural before it is technological. It starts with leadership, involves staff in the design and shows quick wins.

A realistic four-phase plan:

1. Diagnosis (1 to 2 months): map the current permit workflow and measure real times at each stage.
2. Pilot (3 to 4 months): start in a less complex area, such as event management, one-off licences or institutional communication, to build maturity; or, more ambitiously, in a high-volume, medium-complexity planning process such as prior notifications.
3. Evaluation: compare times, requests for additional documents and satisfaction, before and after.
4. Expansion: scale the same platform, methodically, to areas with heavier regulation: planning, public works, environment and social support.

The secret is to start small but with purpose: solid foundations of interoperability, user experience and trust in data. That takes political will, strategic vision and budget commitment. The technology is ready.

Questionable takeaways: what this case still has to prove

A hypothetical case is built on assumptions. Before taking it seriously, it is worth challenging it with the questions I would ask of any UX project:

• “Most of the time is dead time.” Plausible, but I have no data to prove it. Validating it means measuring time at each stage from the council’s real case records.
• “The proposed flow is the right one.” It was designed from a generic workflow, not the council’s actual one. And not every review can run in parallel: some depend on others.
• “Validation on submission eliminates requests for more documents.” It reduces them; it doesn’t eliminate them. A system can confirm a document exists, not that it is correct. Technical review will still find content problems.
• “This is a citizen problem.” Partly. Tacit-approval risk, staff retention and management dashboards are the institution’s problems. And in permitting, the person dealing with the council is usually the architect or designer. Their pains (unclear requirements, criteria that vary from one technician to another) may matter more than a tracking screen.
• “Low-code is the answer.” There are obvious alternatives the article doesn’t rule out: the national electronic platform provided for in the Simplex reform, existing municipal software on the market, redesigning the process without new technology, or simply adding staff. Low-code may win on flexibility and integration, but that has to be shown.

The next step is not to build. It is to research: interviews with technicians, architects and applicants, and real data on time per stage. Only then will we know whether this is the right problem and the right solution.

Conclusion: start small, think of the whole municipality

Sesimbra has everything it needs to be an example of a modern municipal service: a demanding territory that calls for rigorous decisions, and citizens and businesses who deserve fast answers. Low-code makes it possible to reconcile both without large IT projects or new teams.

The first step is modest: pick one process, measure the before, build the after. The results speak for themselves, and open the way for the rest of the council.

Modernising is not about replacing people with systems. It is about giving them tools that automate the repetitive, interpret the complex and explain the opaque. So that the council works with the same empathy, predictability and clarity as any good digital service, whether in Dubai, Lisbon or Sesimbra.

Nuno Flórido is a UX/UI Designer and Design Team Lead at S4 Digital, a company based in Setúbal, with experience in digital transformation projects in the public and private sectors internationally. He works with artificial intelligence and User Experience methodologies from the discovery phase: defining the problem to solve and closing one solution at a time.

Edit notes

Lisbon time.

30 Sep 202618:44

Edition 1Added the section “Questionable takeaways”, which challenges the assumptions this case is built on, and a suggested next step: research before building.

Edition 2English version revised: the title now says “building permits”, local acronyms (PDM, REN, RAN) are explained in plain words, and ANACOM and INE are introduced for international readers.

Edition 3The figures and sources are unchanged.

30 Sep 202613:41

Initial publication, in Portuguese and English. The diagram is illustrative and uses no real data.