Sustainability assessment methods of urban design: a review

Cities are responsible for 70% of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as the depletion of agricultural land and natural resources. The sustainable urban design can achieve the required balance, in addition to measuring convergence with sustainable development and the possibility of dealing with long term urban problems. It also encourages community participation by involving people in the design process through its various stages, and asks them to contribute to decision-making, which represents one of the foundations of collective action in creating sustainable urban design. The vision of this paper is to clarify the concept of sustainability assessment of urban design. The analysis of current situations is based on a critical review and comparison among six assessment tools from the UK, USA, Japan, Portugal, UAE and Qatar. The study focuses on finding out the strengths, weaknesses, the content use, weighting, scoring, certificates rating and context of the assessment tools. The findings of this study suggest that the existing assessment tools focus on environmental issues; and some extent social issues of sustainable urban design, while economic indicators are not emphasized in any of the tools, with ambiguity in the mechanism of local adoptions and community participation