Browsing by Subject "Sustainability assessment"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5

Open Access
Developing micro-level urban ecosystem indicators for sustainability assessment
(Elsevier, 2015) Dizdaroğlu, Didem
Sustainability assessment is increasingly being viewed as an important tool to aid in the shift towards sustainable urban ecosystems. An urban ecosystem is a dynamic system and requires regular monitoring and assessment through a set of relevant indicators. An indicator is a parameter which provides information about the state of the environment by producing a quantitative value. Indicator-based sustainability assessment needs to be considered on all spatial scales to provide efficient information of urban ecosystem sustainability. The detailed data is necessary to assess environmental change in urban ecosystems at local scale and easily transfer this information to the national and global scales. This paper proposes a set of key micro-level urban ecosystem indicators for monitoring the sustainability of residential developments. The proposed indicator framework measures the sustainability performance of urban ecosystem in 3 main categories including: natural environment, built environment, and socio-economic environment which are made up of 9 sub-categories, consisting of 23 indicators. This paper also describes theoretical foundations for the selection of each indicator with reference to the literature.
Open Access
Ecological approaches in planning for sustainable cities: a review of the literature
(2015-03) Yigitcanlar, T.; Dizdaroğlu, Didem
Rapid urbanization has brought environmentally, socially, and economically great challenges to cities and societies. To build a sustainable city, these challenges need to be faced efficiently and successfully. This paper focuses on the environmental issues and investigates the ecological approaches for planning sustainable cities through a comprehensive review of the relevant literature. The review focuses on several differing aspects of sustainable city formation. The paper provides insights on the interaction between the natural environment and human activities by identifying environmental effects resulting from this interaction; provides an introduction to the concept of sustainable urban development by underlining the important role of ecological planning in achieving sustainable cities; introduces the notion of urban ecosystems by establishing principles for the management of their sustainability; describes urban ecosystem sustainability assessment by introducing a review of current assessment methods, and; offers an outline of indexing urban environmental sustainability. The paper concludes with a summary of the findings.
Open Access
Integrating urban ecosystem sustainability assessment into policy-making: insights from the Gold Coast City
(Routledge, 2016) Dizdaroğlu, Didem; Yigitcanlar, T.
This paper introduces a policy-making support tool called ‘Micro-level Urban-ecosystem Sustainability IndeX (MUSIX)’. The index serves as a sustainability assessment model that monitors six aspects of urban ecosystems – hydrology, ecology, pollution, location, design, and efficiency – based on parcel-scale indicators. This index is applied in a case study investigation in the Gold Coast City, Queensland, Australia. The outcomes reveal that there are major environmental problems caused by increased impervious surfaces from growing urban development in the study area. The findings suggest that increased impervious surfaces are linked to increased surface runoff, car dependency, transport-related pollution, poor public transport accessibility, and unsustainable built environment. This paper presents how the MUSIX outputs can be used to guide policy-making through the evaluation of existing policies.
Open Access
Measuring residential sustainability performance: an indexing approach
(Inderscience Publishers, 2019) Dizdaroğlu, Didem
This research investigates the environmental impacts of urban development by developing a parcel-level sustainability assessment tool to guide sustainable urban development. The paper introduces a GIS-based model called the ‘micro-level urban-ecosystem sustainability index (MUSIX)’, which has been designed as a policy-making support tool to highlight key environmental issues at a micro-level, concentrating specifically on residential developments. The model has been tested in a comparative study of Angora Evleri (Angora Houses, Turkey) and East Killara (Australia). Despite certain limitations in its implementation, the results of the study demonstrate that a parcel-based spatial analysis can be used as a tool to identify problems in current local policies and to suggest ways to improve their efficiency. As a future research direction, MUSIX could be combined with a new module for the evaluation of alternative development scenarios. By producing accessible, accurate and easily combined parcel-level data, planners, governments and other actors could benefit from the model outputs in many ways during the decision-making process.
Open Access
The role of indicator-based sustainability assessment in policy and the decision-making process : a review and outlook
(MDPI AG, 2017) Dizdaroğlu, Didem
In order to regulate natural processes and control the scale of human activities, sustainability assessment needs to be integrated into urban planning. In this context, indicator-based sustainability assessment tools are fundamental instruments that provide information to support policy and decision-making. Indicators are necessary to monitor the implementation of the policies and provide feedback needed to accomplish the desirable state of sustainable urban development. This paper aims to explore the role of indicator-based sustainability assessment in policy and the decision-making process. Therefore, it reviews the identified sustainable development indicator initiatives and addresses the research gaps in the literature for future improvement of sustainability assessment frameworks. It concludes with a discussion that the major problem in sustainability assessment lies in the gathering of reliable and accessible data.