Urban Sustainability Assessment

This lecture by the instructor delves into the concept of urban sustainability assessment, focusing on the spatial scale and system boundaries in urban areas. It covers the importance of understanding sustainability, deriving indicators, and performing assessments. The lecture explores the need for targeted sustainability tools in urban planning, using the Canton of Geneva as a case study. It discusses the development of a typology for defining functional local neighborhoods and the application of indicators adapted from the LEED-ND framework. The study design involves data collection, typology development, and sustainability assessment, highlighting the relevance of local-scale approaches. The lecture concludes by emphasizing the impact of spatial scale and system boundaries on sustainability assessment outcomes.