Neighborhood sustainability assessment in action: Cross-evaluation of three assessment systems and their cases from the US, the UK, and Japan

Abstract

As the building blocks of cities, neighborhoods play a major role in helping to achieve global sustainability. In the past decade, several assessment tools worldwide have been developed to evaluate the effectiveness of the increasing number of neighborhood (re)development plans. While there is a plethora of research investigating various aspects of building assessment tools, until now little studies have looked at the empirical aspects of neighborhood sustainability assessment. To address this lacuna in literature, this study explores the uptake of sustainability criteria in projects certified under neighborhood sustainability assessment tools. In addition, it examines three cases from the US, the UK, and Japan that have been highly ranked under LEED-ND, BREEAM Communities, and CASBEE-UD, respectively. This is done through investigating compliance of each case with the principles of sustainable development. Furthermore, a series of comparative case studies are undertaken to evaluate each case using assessment tools other than the ones that have, in reality, been used for certifying the selected developments. In addition to highlighting strengths and weaknesses of each development, results show that social, economic, and institutional aspects are not adequately accounted for in theory and practice. Practice of neighborhood sustainability assessment is, to a large extent, market-driven and characterized by the dominance of the environmental aspects of sustainability. Also, results indicate that assessment tools can co-evolve through learning from their successes and failures. Results of this study can be used for optimizing the assessment tools.