Urban Environmental Quality and Sustainability: a proposal for an evaluation method of Neighborhood Sustainable Assessment tools

In the last decades, the necessity of employing tools to evaluate the sustainability of urban areas, in all its forms, has encouraged the spread of a new kind of instruments, called Neighborhood Sustainable Assessment tools (NSA tools). Such tools can be considered as analysis procedures able to lead the decision-making process, from the design to building phase of a new urban settlement. The majority of NSA tools, produced mostly by nongovernmental bodies, has been developed as spin-off, whose methodology derives from sustainable assessment tools at building scale. Furthermore, from the literature review (Sharifi and Murayama 2012; Orova and Reith 2013) it arises that their spread has also been favored by the need for NSA tools, coming from different urban cultures, to drive urban transformation processes according to their own territorial peculiarities. At international level, one of the most known NSA tools is LEED ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development), developed in 2009 by the US Green Building Council (US GBC). In Europe, one of the most widely used tools is BREEAM Communities (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology Communities), released in 2009 by the Building Research Establishment (BRE). In Italy, one of most successful one is GBC Quartieri, created in 2015 by the GBC Italia and inspired to LEED ND (GBC Italia 2015). Considering the vast number of instruments and their increased spread, it seems to be necessary to verify, with a scientific approach, which are the strategies pursued by each tool and how their choice may affect the planning of a new urban area. Many studies have dealt with NSA tools with a scientific approach (Orova and Reith 2013; Sharifi and Murayama 2013), but only a few of them have taken into consideration the outcome of the assessments on a large number of certified projects. Taking into account their impacts on the layout and the organization of urban settlements, it is fundamental that NSA tools be designed to pursue all the objectives concerning the urban life. Therefore, such instruments should primarily take account of people and activities as well as the space and territory, without neglecting any of the elements affecting the urban environmental quality. Therefore, among several NSA tools, it has been analyzed LEED ND, because it states, in a decisive manner, that its main purpose is the sustainability of new urban areas. The aim of this paper is to understand whether and how such instrument is able to help a new settlement turning into a more sustainable area, as well as considering the needs of the society of the future (Salvati et al. 2013; Zyngier, Pensa and Masala 2014; Gargiulo and Dispoto 2015).This paper is divided into three paragraphs. The first describes the method adopted for analyzing the tool; the second presents the main findings derived from the analysis of the certified projects; finally, the third proposes future developments of the study and their potential applications.