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Sustainability Assessment of Urban Areas – A Case-study

Autor: Luís Bragança
University of Minho
Otros autores: URBENERE
Tipo: Comunicación técnica escrita
Temática: Renovacion urbana
Documentos asociados: Doc. Escrito
Resumen:
In order to cope with the high environmental and social impacts of the building sector, several sustainability assessment tools have been developed since the 90’s. The first tools to emerge, such as BREEAM, LEED and GBTool (now SBTool) were developed to assess and certify buildings according to their performance in several categories and indicators. More than 20 years later, the scientific knowledge about this type of tools is well explored and developed. However, more recently, there are emerging new tools, developed not for buildings but for larger areas such as neighbourhoods, communities and even cities. Some recent studies indicate that most of these tools, based on their predecessors, have some issues regarding the assessment of larger areas, such as redundancy of indicators, in the placement of indicators in the assessment framework, problems in scope and in the definition of urban sustainability. The methodology to identify those issues is the detailed analysis of the indicators used in each of the above referred assessment tools, their respective benchmarks and evaluation procedure, as well as the weighting factors. Afterwards, a comparative analysis of the application of those assessment tools to a medium size city case-study is performed in order to check the inconsistencies and to illustrate how different are the obtained sustainability labels. Finally, the obtained results list the identified problems and help to build some good practices guidelines for the development of existing and new urban sustainability assessment tools, allowing them to be more adequate to the local context and the reality of the neighbourhoods, communities and even cities where it is intended to evaluate the urban sustainability.