Critical overview of urban sustainability assessment tools

Abstract

Sustainability assessment has been promoted by several institutions and organizations in order to encourage sustainable practices in the building sector. The scope of the first assessment tools was on buildings and building solutions. Research within this field of knowledge is already well established. But very recently, there has been a progressive development of tools aiming at broader scales such as neighborhoods, urban districts and larger urban areas. These assessment tools borrowed strategies that were used in their predecessors (aiming at the building scale) that bring some problems when assessing sustainability in urban areas. In this article, several sustainability assessment tools for urban areas were analyzed in several criteria. The analysis showed that all existing assessment tools share some issues regardless of having different approaches. It is argued that sustainability assessment tools need to evolve in the sense of becoming more similar regarding their assessment framework and scoring methods.