physical environment

The fast and uncontrolled emergence of a will to promote sustainable development in the field of building construction generates new require-ments for urban development. Besides technical solutions, project managers or urban planners must take into consideration the overall impact of his project on the local and global environ-ment as well as social trends, economic devel-opment, health and safety for users. Integration of a huge number of evaluation criteria makes the assessment of such strategy very hard to carry out without a real methodological work. This paper proposes a first methodological ap-proach in order to evaluate sustainability at the district scale. This methodology allows actors in the building sector to consider different sustain-able alternatives for a project. The methodology is based on 8 objectives: four of them concern social and economical aspects and are not ad-dressed now. The next four objectives are Pre-serve the resources (RES), Preserve the ecosys-tem (ECO), Improve the quality of the physical environment (AMB for "Ambiance") and Pre-serve health and manage risks (RIS). Each ob-jective is assessed by a set of indicators, thus professionals can evaluate quantitatively differ-ent alternatives of a district project planning by means of Amoeba diagrams. Also, this method-ology is a contribution to the French research project ADEQUA funded and initiated by th