Chapter 26: Feature-Based Comparison of International Green Neighbourhood Assessment Systems
Together with many social and economic benefits of urbanization, there are also environmental problems. Cities comprise less than 3% of Earth’s surface, but there is an extraordinary concentration of population, industry and energy use, leading to a massive local pollution and environmental degradation. Green neighbourhood has emerged to respond to these urban environmental problems. Green neighbourhood is broadly defined as being moderately dense, mixeduse, designed at a human scale, active and public transportation oriented and literally “green”. A green neighbourhood assessment system is a tool that evaluates sustainability performance of a given neighbourhood against a set of criteria. This chapter evaluates 20 major international green neighbourhood assessment systems according to their particular features. Regarding regional distribution of the systems around the world, the initiative of green neighbourhood assessment system was first started in United Kingdom and European Union in 2000 and 2004, respectively and this trend reached to United States in 2005. Meanwhile, LEED (ND) with 184 certificates/projects is the main well-known system in the world followed by Envirodevelopment in Australia and SPeAR in the United Kingdom with 100 certificates/projects each. Future research can be conducted on the implementation of several green neighbourhood assessment systems on actual projects and compare their capabilities in measuring the rate of greening.