Neighbourhood-scale fire safety code compliance: a BIM–GIS perspective on the Turkish regulations

Purpose Ensuring compliance with fire safety regulations is critical for disaster risk reduction and is a prerequisite for obtaining building permits. In most municipalities, fire safety compliance checks still rely on paper-based reviews that are time-consuming and error-prone. In addition, existing research on code checking has largely remained limited to the building footprint, with limited consideration of the wider urban context on which many fire codes depend. This paper aims to propose a loosely coupled building information modeling (BIM)–geographic information systems (GIS) framework for automated fire safety compliance checking that explicitly incorporates neighbourhood-scale spatial conditions. Design/methodology/approach Building data are modelled in BIM, whereas neighbourhood-level data are represented in geographic information systems (GIS), with both data sets integrated through a coupling mechanism. The Turkish fire regulations are analysed and the computable, spatially dependent clauses are subsequently modelled as machine-interpretable rules. The framework is demonstrated through a hypothetical use-case scenario that shows how neighbourhood-scale spatial conditions influence compliance outcomes and how spatially dependent fire safety regulations can be evaluated through an integrated BIM–GIS environment. Findings The results demonstrate that a substantial subset of fire safety regulations depends on neighbourhood-level spatial information and therefore cannot be evaluated reliably using building information alone. Loosely coupled BIM–GIS integration provides a viable basis for more consistent and less error-prone checks. Originality/value This study contributes a digital workflow for automating fire safety compliance checks by integrating BIM and GIS data and by operationalising neighbourhood-scale regulatory requirements through rule-based interpretation and spatial analysis.