Sustainable Neighbourhood Design Research Articles

Determining People s Design Priorities for Neighbourhood Units: A Study in Liverpool, Merseyside

Local planning authorities and developers aim at designing and regenerating neighbourhoods in which people want to live. However, this aim is difficult to achieve if participation is conducted poorly. As a result, people may live in places that are created according to the ideas of designers and the priorities of market conditions and not according to their own. Therefore, determining people's preferences is essential for livable and sustainable neighbourhood design. This paper introduces and tests a method for determining people's design preferences, namely an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) methodology. The method is based on making pairwise comparisons of key design principles and structural factors of neighbourhood units. The testing was conducted in Liverpool city centre. Here, it was established that participants' priorities in neighbourhood design are safety, affordable housing and accessibility, respectively. Also, participants prefer to live in non-gated detached and semi-detached housing communities. This article offers an empirical contribution to the participatory neighbourhood planning literature.

Towards digitalisation of socially sustainable neighbourhood design

ABSTRACT Digital tools for performance-assessment are commonly used to shorten the feedback loop in testing designs for buildings and neighbourhoods. However, these tools do not extend to the social dimension in the same way as the economic and environmental dimensions. This paper aims to contribute to the development of digital tools to design socially sustainable neighbourhoods. We analyse 115 academic articles to establish a theoretical understanding of Social Sustainability (SoSu). Based on these results, we propose a digital user-interaction model to operationalise SoSu in the digital design process of buildings. In the literature, we observe a lack of consensus on the theoretical discussion on SoSu. Several extrinsic and intrinsic factors are identified contributing to this fuzziness; the dependency on stakeholder value systems, the qualitative nature of social indicators, and comparison to environmental sustainability being the most common. Still, we distinguish two overarching categories, social equity and social capital, that are further divided into sub-themes. Having mapped the categories and hierarchies of social themes, we propose a user-interaction model that incorporates these findings into a digital environment. The user-interaction model creates a guided decision-making framework for architects and urban planners by enabling stakeholders to make conscious and informed decisions grounded in theory.

Evaluating livability and perceived values of sustainable neighborhood design: New Urbanism and original urban suburbs

New Urbanism is a popular development tool that advocates for dense and accessible neighborhoods which are more conducive to generating walking and neighboring activities. This research analyzes the ability of residents and users of space to perceive the actual design components and theories in place that have actively created the community they inhabit and use. Two study sites are selected within the St. Louis region in the United States, a New Urbanist development and an original urban suburb, that both possess comparable demographic, physical, and aesthetic characteristics. The resulting similarity in the responses of each demonstrates that these design attributes are valued within the study sites regardless of how and when each was founded. In this case, the sustainable neighborhood design elements of the streetcar suburb are correspondingly perceived in the New Urbanist community, effectively translating them from the original method of building suburban cities into the modern era.

Qatar Sustainability Assessment System (QSAS)-Neighborhood Development (ND) Assessment Model: Coupling green urban planning and green building design

The green building rating systems endeavor to achieve the extent of sustainability in building scale; however, they are lacking in assessing the urban scale. Few green building rating systems have developed the neighborhood sustainability assessment (NSA) tools to this extent. Qatar has adopted some of these tools; while the local tool is needed that fits government sustainability policies and international agendas. Hence, this research developed the QSAS (Qatar Sustainability Assessment System) Neighborhood Development (ND) assessment model. The main goal of QSAS-ND is to promote, enhance, and create a sustainable neighborhood in urban areas. To develop QSAS-ND, the researchers applied the Waterfall Process method, and accordingly, has conducted three phases; the requirement study, model design, and model validation. Phase one identified eight criteria for sustainable neighborhood assessment using Compression Matrix Development (CMD) method. Phase two designed the model and applied the Analytical Network Process (ANP) method to obtain the weights of criteria. The ANP analysis determined that compactness has received the highest limited value (LVC2 = 0.30730) among the criteria which is followed by urban connectivity (LVC1 = 0.29143). The model was implemented at Lusail city for validation. The implementation resulted that Lusail city achieved grade A (Superior), means that it has high performances in sustainable neighborhood design, but needs minor improvements regarding diversity and transportation. Indeed, using the QSAS-ND model helps architects and urban planners to assess sustainability accreditation of urban and neighborhood areas in Qatar.

The Social Dimension of Sustainable Neighborhood Design: Comparing Two Neighborhoods in Freiburg, Germany

The study presented in this article adds to the body of research on the socio-cultural dimension of sustainable cit-ies by looking at the efforts of the City of Freiburg, Germany to create neighborhoods that acknowledge the im-portance of the social dimension of sustainable development. The research in this article is centered on evaluating the social responses of living in Freiburg’s two recognized sustainable neighborhoods Rieselfeld and Vauban. The study focuses on the motivational factors that prompted todays residents of the two neighborhoods to move there in the first place, their level of satisfaction living there now, and their perceived social interactions and level of community engagement. Result show that satisfaction with living in a place and reinforcing its assets through so-cial resiliency or livability can result in long-term community staying power. In general, there were few differences in preferences ratings of physical and social assets between the two communities. The levels of importance of so-cial factors contributing to place satisfaction and staying power were not significantly different in both neighbor-hoods. Having a “cluster” of social factors present that were important to residents contributed significantly to place satisfaction. In fact, survey results showed that it was these social factors that were seen as more important to place satisfaction than the physical attributes of sustainable developments.

INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL ISSUE 5 : 2016

Today, with more than half of the world population residing in urban areas, urban development has become an extremely significant global phenomenon and this trend continues. Due to the scale and speed, the urban development offers both opportunities and challenges. Through the phenomena such as the concentration of population, buildings, infrastructures, innovation and industry, cities and urban growth centres significantly produce economic growth and offer vast majority of employment opportunities, which subsequently contributes to poverty reduction. Cities are also the centres of modern living where indicators of general health and wellbeing, literacy, technological advancement, culture and social mobility are typically highest. The growth, however, has been not without challenges. Urban development brings congestion and pollution, social segregation and traffic gridlock. It also escalates the environmental and social risks. Today, cities consume 80% of the energy generated worldwide and are responsibility for around 85% of global GHG emissions. Due to this significance, for the first time, sustainable urban development becomes one of the key agendas in the newly announced SDGs (#11).This special issue of Planning Malaysia gathers a total of thirteen articles contributed by the scholars from rich range of the Built Environment disciplines to address and shares the issues and possible solutions contributing to the sustainable development of urban future. For that, we divide them into six broad themes, which include urban environment as its core, demographic-focused studies on the elderly, sectoral research into housing and labour supply in construction industry, mobility for urban living with different groups of community, building level sustainability and conservation as part of urban development resiliency.The urban environment theme consists of three articles with different focus. "Sustainable urban development through urban consolidation policy in Shiraz, Iran" highlights the initiatives at policy level, followed by "An initiative based assessment frame for smart city" which outlines the measurable indicators for a smart city. The authors of "Environmental psychology: The urban built environment impact on human mental health" on the other hand, explores the psychological dimensions of built environment impact.The second theme is the demographic study with special attention given to the elderly group. "Elderly policy framework and active ageing in Malaysia" reviews the policy required for active ageing and sustainable neighbourhood design for elderly while the distribution of existing health care facilities for elderly is addressed in "Elderly and community health care facilities: A spatial analysis".Sectoral research papers included in this special issue are "Sustainable housing affordability in East Malaysia" where the authors focus on the trade-off of building affordability housing in the case of Sabah, and "The challenge of labour shortage for sustainable construction" brings up the factors influencing the labour supply in construction industry and the possible solutions.

A cross-comparative analysis of four projects towards sustainable neighbourhood design

This article presents a cross-comparative analysis of four projects’ progress towards sustainable neighbourhood design. It starts by explaining key strengths and weaknesses of the research methodology adopted. It then explains key features of, and reasons for, selecting the four projects. It subsequently compares the four case studies’ relative levels of progress towards sustainability, highlighting key factors contributing to differences in performance. Finally, it points to lessons learnt for promoting future sustainable neighbourhood development.

Sustainable Neighbourhood Planning and Design in Malaysian Perspective

Sustainable development becomes the significant tool of planning and design of building structures and infrastructures in this decade. The land use development for neighbourhood construction should be protected from being overused and devastated. Malaysia must starts to incorporate sustainable neighbourhood planning and design so that the future generation can be benefited from this type of development. However less focus is being paid to this type of development which needs attention to be given especially on small-scale green areas. The main concern of this paper is to address the practice of sustainable neighbourhood planning and design in Malaysia as it gives much impact to the living environment of a group of community. The issues pertaining Malaysian sustainable development planning and sustainable neighbourhood design were discussed in this paper. Results from the Malaysian Local Council Structure Plan review were discussed to highlight the sustainable neighbourhood importance. The result indicates that the sustainable neighbourhood planning and design in Malaysia needs to be improved over the current practices to create more environmental-friendly neighbourhood.

Toward sustainable neighbourhoods: the need to consider infrastructure interactions

This paper details the role of infrastructure in promoting sustainability at the neighbourhood scale. A sustainable neighbourhood design process is outlined and the importance of adopting a systems perspective and considering infrastructure interconnections is emphasized. The performance of local infrastructure systems (e.g., buildings and local transportation network) is influenced by interactions with the greater urban region and with other local infrastructure. Through a broad review of the literature on transportation, water, building, and urban forestry systems, this paper identifies many of these extra- and inter-neighbourhood interactions. The paper concludes that it is difficult to achieve neighbourhood sustainability objectives without infrastructure systems at the urban scale that support these micro-scale goals. Furthermore, interactions between local infrastructure systems can have a positive or negative impact on infrastructure performance and environmental impacts. Careful consideration of these relationships during neighbourhood design could yield significant improvements in infrastructure resource efficiency as well as reductions in pollutant emissions and overall costs.Key words: sustainable neighbourhood design, infrastructure systems, transportation, water, buildings, urban forestry.

Design-led sustainable development: The Liveable Neighbourhoods experiment in Perth, Western Australia

The Western Australian Liveable Neighbourhoods Design Code is an ambitious and internally acclaimed initiative to introduce sustainable neighbourhood design principles into the design of new suburban subdivisions. This paper explores the issues surrounding its implementation over the period 1998–2002, examining the debates and further research undertaken on each of the design principles. A broad assessment is made of its significant impact on suburban design in the Perth Metropolitan Region, and note is taken of its arguably greater impacts on redevelopment and revitalisation projects in existing urban areas. The key barriers to its wider adoption have been both procedural (slowness in processing applications and deficiencies in the skills of development controllers and engineers) and substantive (issues of appropriate densities, lot sizes, retail and service provisions, culs-de-sac and biodiversity). The paper illustrates how debates about each of these issues have met developer resistance, which has dogged the implementation of the Code. More positively, however, it illustrates that where the Code accords with market trends there has been significant progress in developing potentially more sustainable patterns of development. However, the achieved densities remain low by all but Australian and North American standards, and have not increased significantly over the lifetime of the Code.