Melinda Orova

Urban development principles have evolved from sustainability, where the focus was on limiting the negative impact of urban environment, to restorative and regenerative sustainability, where positive impact is needed on global social and ecological systems. This recent paradigm shift requires the development of new tools for practitioners, like design methodologies, new technologies, and assessment methods.To measure the impact of sustainability on the built environment, several building-scale assessment tools exist. The question is how these widespread rating systems support restorative change in the built environment.The main question of the research is answered in three methodological steps. First, the goals of restorative sustainability are summarized from the available extensive literature, including the topics of Place, Energy, Water, Well-being, Carbon, Resources, Equity, Education, and Economics. Then different rating tools (Living Building Challenge, WELL, LEED, BREEAM, DGN...

Sustainable assessment systems have been developed for evaluating different scales of the built environment (building, neighbourhood and city). Multiple scale assessments are necessary as only their coexistence can allow recognition of the environmental, social and economic sustainability of the whole built environment. The integration of assessments of different scales can provide efficient methods and better synergies in the urban fabric. This paper analyses the different scales of the most widespread systems (LEED, BREEAM, CASBEE, DGNB, Estidama) and attempts to define how the indicator systems on different scales relate to each other by comparison on four levels (general, category, index and indicator). The results show that the different scales of an assessment scheme mainly work as individual certification systems, but there are strong connections between building and neighbourhood systems. The comparison indicates that the city scale assessments have the most different charac...

The study concentrates on five internationally recognized assessment systems: CASBEE-UD, LEED-ND, the 2009 and 2012 versions of the BREEAM Communities and the DGNB-UD. These neighbourhood sustainability assessment tools have been compared and evaluated with quantitative and qualitative methods. The neighbourhood sustainability assessment tools can be compared based on the different levels of their structure. In the study the evaluation of the indicator assessment is presented. As a result of the detailed investigation of indicators the improvement from building evaluations, the sustainability coverage, and suggestions for the future improvement of the neighbourhood sustainability assessment tools are concluded.