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CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT FRAMEWORKS
Abstract
Urban sustainability has been a topic of keen interest to both the scientific community, as well as practitioners around the world. However, despite increased efforts in recent years, the debate continues over its clear definition and especially its measurement and monitoring. As the concept of urban sustainability is deeply rooted in its physical context and the territory scale taken into consideration, a wide variety of studies, diagrams, graphic models or value maps have been proposed, as each researcher and national agency develops its own framework and quantification system based on locally specific characteristics. Additional problems arise from the confusion created by the overwhelming number of indicators developed to measure sustainability, each with its own issues over generalization, measurement overlapping, data availability and ease of calculation. The aim of this study is a critical analysis of the most widely used and accepted systems of urban sustainability analysis and measurement, to determine their strengths and weaknesses. Both the comprehensiveness of the indicators and metrics, as well as the overall design are taken into consideration for their ease of use, readability, adaptability and inclusion of state-of-the-art sustainability principles
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