Analysis of environmental assessment methods for urban settlements

Abstract

As many world-wide developed assessment methods for sustanability of isolated buildings and their constituting systems performance, new environmental assessment systems have recently been proposed, taking into account neighborhood, land sub-division and urbanistic issues. They integrate the principles of smart growth, sustainable development and green building, such as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Developments Rating System (LEED-ND), developed in the United States; Approche Environnementale de l'Urbanisme (AEU), developed in France; Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Sustainability Report Guidelines, developed by United Nations; and many others. With new sustainability paradigms and difficulties on dealing specifically with sustainable cities grows, there are needs on selecting criteria, strategies and measurable indicators in order to anchoring formulation, controlling implementation and evaluating results of the urban policies in sustainable basis, according to the proposed guidelines of Global and Brazilian Agendas 21. However, in the last decades, the urban growth has happened in a dispersed form, by displacement process of typically urban activities for the rural areas, observed by the urban spots disposal in satellites images, as many urban polar regions separated by rural or open lands. Inserted in this context called "diffuse urbanization", the land sub-division by plotting is a model of urban growth that would cause significative impacts in landscape and ecology and, consequently, in the activities of urban planning. Therefore, this paper helps to understand the many locally and internationally environmental assessment methods for urban plotting, through qualitative and comparative critical analysis, focusing the advantages and disadvantages, applicability and results of each one of the existing models, using the case study methodology for a residential plotting, the Gênesis Project, in Santana do Parnaíba, city of São Paulo metropolitan area.