Development of community sustainability assessment methods in medium-sized cities in Chile

Abstract

<p>Urban research related to sustainability is going through a rich experimental stage to explore different methods to deal with the current and future impacts of climate change on cities. This poses new challenges to the redevelopment of urban areas. These challenges are particularly relevant at a time of major urban transformation in the global south. This paper aims to develop a method to explore and evaluate the sustainable potential of urban morphology in the surrounding areas of medium-sized cities. The method involves six criteria related to the sustainability of built environment: scale, accessibility, diversity, connectivity, density and node. This approach applies to a community in Temuco, southern Chile. The results show the importance of building adaptive capacity to generate use diversity, which in turn promotes greater sustainability of urban morphology. On the other hand, the high population and housing density in residential areas reduce the pedestrian capacity of indoor streets, while the vertical mixed use and the change of urban block density are still the best response to promote social interaction and high collective activities in urban space. This paper summarizes the operational value of this method and reflects on the progress made in promoting the more sustainable urban form development of medium-sized cities in southern Chile in the future.</p>