Sustainability assessment of urban districts: benchmark for quality of physical environment

The fast and uncontrolled emergence of a will topromote sustainable development in the field ofbuilding construction generates new requirementsfor urban development. Besides technicalsolutions, project managers or urban plannersmust take into consideration the overall impactof his project on the local and global environmentas well as social trends, economic development,health and safety for users. Integrationof a huge number of evaluation criteria makesthe assessment of such strategy very hard tocarry out without a real methodological work.This paper proposes a first methodological approachin order to evaluate sustainability at thedistrict scale. This methodology allows actors inthe building sector to consider different sustainablealternatives for a project. The methodologyis based on 8 objectives: four of them concernsocial and economical aspects and are not addressednow. The next four objectives are Preservethe resources (RES), Preserve the ecosystem(ECO), Improve the quality of the physicalenvironment (AMB for "Ambiance") and Preservehealth and manage risks (RIS). Each objectiveis assessed by a set of indicators, thusprofessionals can evaluate quantitatively differentalternatives of a district project planning bymeans of Amoeba diagrams. Also, this methodologyis a contribution to the French researchproject ADEQUA funded and initiated by theFrench Ministry of Research and ADEME(French Agency for Environment and EnergyManagement).This article presents a comparison betweentwo district projects. Both districts are evaluatedthrough the objective AMB (that is to say "qualityof the physical environment"). The aim ofthis comparison is to establish and validatebenchmarks corresponding to each indicator.Each indicator is quantified and benchmark valuesenable stakeholders to assess each alternative.The evaluation of the objective AMB isapplied to a case study: the project "EspacesGare" which concerns the planning of districtsnear La Rochelle train station (France).