Assessment of district projects

Abstract

ABSTRACT The fast and uncontrolled emergence of a will to promote sustainable development in the field of building construction generates new requirements for urban development. Besides technical solutions, project managers or urban planners must take into consideration the overall impact of their project on the local and global environment as well as social trends, economic development, 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 approach in order to evaluate sustainability at the district scale and is based on 8 objectives. It is also a contribution to the French research project ADEQUA. This article presents a comparison between two district projects through the objective “quality of the physical environment”. This objective is defined and applied to a case study: the project “Espaces Gare” which concerns the planning of districts near La Rochelle train station (France).