Assessment of sustainability in
urban planning of a coastal city:
the city of Coronel, southern Chile
B. Suazo1, E. Jaque1, C. Rojas2 & R. Utz1
1Facultad de Arquitectura, Urbanismo y Geografía,
Universidad de Concepción, Chile
2Departamento de Geografía, Universidad de Alcalá, Spain
Abstract
Population increases in the coastal area in the Bío Bío region (Chile) have
transformed the urban landscape, creating the need for new urban areas for
residential land use. This expansion has resulted in the use of locations
vulnerable to natural hazards, and outpacing urban planning instruments. The
city of Coronel is a typical urban space located in this coastal zone. Coronel’s
Urban Planning was recently updated in 2003, and the present study’s objective
is to evaluate its environmental sustainability using a system of indicators
applicable to the proposed land coverage model established in the 2003 urban
planning instrument.
Urban sustainability indicators are obtained using Geographic Information
System (GIS) tools. The indicators are based on three territorial components: the
distribution of land use and physical structure, land coverage and environmental
quality. The data is gathered in the proposed urban land zonings. The method
applies sustainability development concepts in data modeling, spatial analysis
and geoprocessing in GIS. The results characterize the proposed urban model’s
sustainability.
Keywords: sustainability indicator, urban planning, GIS.
1 Introduction
Urban planning is a public sector tool of increasing importance used to achieve
competitiveness and habitability in Chilean cities. Considering that one of the
principal objectives of urban planning is to orient a territory’s development

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harmonically with its surroundings, its importance is undeniable considering
Chile’s present level of development. In this context, Coronel County, located
on the Pacific coast in the Bio Bío region (37º S and 73º 0`), presented a new
urban zoning plan [1].
The organization and use of county territory is defined in a development
policy that valorizes land resources, climate and landscape in order to promote
investment in the productive, industrial and tourism sectors. The concept of
sustainability intrinsically connects economic growth, environmental protection
and social equity. The County of Coronel has evolved and changed in the last
few years due to the crisis in coal mining and the growth of new productive
industrial activities, resulting in a new scenario of county and urban growth, and
consequently new urban planning. This transformation required a reconsideration
of the image of the city of Coronel in order to more effectively use its resources,
such as a strategic geographic location in southern Chile, land appropriate for
industrial development, a natural protected port, fishing, forests, and a
consolidated urban area with history and cultural heritage.


























Figure 1: Geographic location of Coronel County.
The reformulation of the Regulating Plan was principally oriented to favor
the growth of economic and social activities in the city based in compatible
interests between public and private actors to preserve the quality of Coronel’s

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urban and county environment to establish patterns and standards of sustainable
quality by adequately zoning the territory, ordering the structuring roads,
defining the expansion areas, determining urban limits and establishing
infrastructure in convenient locations.
In the last few years, planners and scientists have studied cities from a
sustainability perspective, finding that actual urban growth patterns have
produced environmental, social and economic costs. In this area, an especially
interesting challenge is the identification of conceptually and methodologically
solid procedures to measure sustainability in territorial city models. In the last
few years, the principal initiatives have been developed by different
governments that seek to identify unsustainable patterns and tendencies in urban
growth.
The concept of urban sustainability is widely used, although it remains a
complex, quite vague term because cities present distinct characteristics and
economic models. Urban sustainability is generally understood as equilibrium
between a city’s environmental, economic, and social aspects without degrading
the urban environment, and thus assuring urban life quality [2]. Urban
sustainability offers adequate habitability conditions, satisfies habitant
necessities, and respects the urban environment.
The literature has identified several factors that favor greater urban
sustainability. According to Franchini and Dal Cin, Rueda and Maestu [3–6] the
attributes of a sustainable city are:
• Rational land use, seeking to reduce urban expansion and promoting recycling
of preexisting urban tissues and avoiding low-density urban developments.
• A connection between growth necessities and the preservation of natural and
cultural values. A compact, manageable urban structure.
• An infrastructure organization that facilitates interaction between citizens and
an equitable distribution of resources.
These attributes reflect an approximation of a sustainable city model,
although we need to address the externalities of a compact city and the high
density levels. The compact model, widely offered in Europe, in the 1980s, as
the most sustainable city model, results in a concentration of activities generating
environmental impacts, such as noise and pollution, which are referred to as the
“paradox of the compact city” [7]. In Latin America, the large urban areas are
dispersing and the models of life quality are now associated to low density
residential models and are found at a greater distance from downtown and its
problems. Still, a compact city is more sustainable because it is a dense,
continuous, multifunctional, heterogeneous and diverse city. As a result, it offers
internal complexity, cohesive social life, savings in land, energy and resource
use as well as agricultural and natural system preservation [4, 8].
Considering the growing concern for urban health, it is interesting to analyze
the operative measures and advances in the conditions that can be used to
optimize it. In this sense, sustainability indicators, which are accepted by
politicians and academics to measure the advances in sustainability in a given
territory, will provide information and facilitate communication between experts,
decision makers, and the public in general [9]. Indeed, they reflect one of the

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greatest efforts of urban settlements to evaluate their progress towards
sustainable development [10].
Most countries have adopted the most successful models, such as the PSR
(Pressure – State – Response) and/or FSR (Motor Force – State – Response)
models. These indicators have been mainly used in national and regional studies
[11]. In the case of cities, two types of indicators have been used in the
literature: urban sustainability indicators for evaluation and diagnostics and
sustainability indicators for (prospective) city planning. In city diagnostics, the
studies of Shane and Graedel [12], Romero, Vásquez [13], Bolocco and Grazzini
[14] and Pauchard [15] are important. While in the area of planning indicators,
the proposal of Carsjens and Ligtenberg [7].
The lack of consensus with respect to the validity of sustainability indicators
has limited their use. Some reflections suggest that they are only useful in
measuring non-sustainability in a city’s development model without providing
efficacious solutions, and thus the demonstration of non-sustainability is more
important that the search for sustainability [2]. Indeed, Escolano [16] argues that
there is no accepted systematic set of indicators to measure urban sustainability.
Additionally, the diversity of contexts, both territorial and socioeconomic,
requires the establishment of specific measures for each case. Still, a discussion
of general concepts, problem components, sustainability attributes and criteria,
and their inter-relation is required to evaluate urban models.
In our case studies of Spanish and Chilean cities, we have used territorial
indicators based in Geographical information systems (GIS), where these are
understood as those that measure spatial differences of any phenomenon as well
as those that recognize these differences as a consequence of the spatial structure
of land use, transport networks, resource locations, and residential typologies. In
other words, these indicators fundamentally evaluate territorial model
sustainability rather than land use sustainability. For more information on prior
results and reflections, please see Salado et al. [17], Rojas et al. [18], Díaz et al.
[19, 20] and Rojas and Díaz [21].
2 Methodology
Urban sustainability indicators are a set of spatial measures applied in urban
planning as represented in the County Zoning Plan. They should be relevant,
easily understandable, reliable, scientifically valid, and based in accessible,
interesting to inform society. In general, they should respond to detected
necessities or problems or they should be simply intuitive in order to identify and
arbitrate solutions [2]. These indicators are generally processed and quantitative,
generating clear, accessible ideas on complex phenomenon, its evolution and the
breach between the actual and desired situation [11]: in our case, the land use
model for local urban planning. The attributes of sustainable urban planning are
adapted to the city model proposed in the plan’s urban zoning and they are the
conditions that should be strengthened.
Communal zoning in Chile defines the consolidated urban land, urbanizable
land, and non-urbanizable land. In our opinion, it is sustainable if in:

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Consolidated urban land exists when there is a compact, spatially continuous
urban structure; mean residential densities; optimized urban land; reuse, urban
renewal, recovery of degraded and abandoned areas; mixture of land use, spatial
co-existence of residential with functional uses or useful non-residential uses
(public services, commerce and other), facilitate the spatial integration of
residential uses. Avoiding third uses that do not reduce residential use; mobility
and integrated public transportation integrated to land uses, and cultural heritage
conservation.
Urbanizable land use areas are those that have mean and low residential
densities; avoid disperse and/or diffuse growth; allow permeable growth,
avoiding the obstacle formation; avoid the proximity of incompatible uses; avoid
the occupation in risk areas; respect very fertile agricultural and forestry land use
and valuable rural spaces; maintain landscapes without degrading them; are
transitions zones between urban and rural areas that provide a space reserve for
growth.
Restricted land use areas are oriented to conserving biodiversity and natural
heritage; preventing the occupation of natural and technological risk areas;
preserving areas with high productive agricultural, forestry, or landscape value;
protecting water systems. As a complement, infrastructure areas and green
areas should supply the population and respond to a good spatial localization.
They are organized in three components: distribution of land use and physical
structure; land use; and environmental quality. Spatial measures evaluate the
proposed city-planning model in order to contribute to new methodologies. In
this sense, GIS offers the possibility of calculating and modeling indicators,
manipulating territorial information layers.
3 Results
3.1 Coronel city in the regional context
Coronel is located south on the lower part of the Bio Bío River. Coal mining
consolidated Coronel as a city in 1851. Federico Schwager initiated coal mining
activities in 1859 in Puchoco and Maule, and small urban areas were built as
copies of English “Company Towns”. From 1865 until the first half of the 20th
Century, Coronel peaked in economic and urban development. Together with
the nearby city of Lota, they were the center of coal mining. Coronel surged as a
vigorous commercial port, around which its principal activities were organized in
the downtown. Designed as an orthogonal reticule, it supplied a large part of the
counties in the Arauco Province.
Between 1950 and 1970, large populations were built in the northern part. In
the 1970s, the neighborhoods Lagunillas and Villa Mora were created together
with others in the sector of Schwager. The coal boom unleashed important
internal migrations and strong urban growth, resulting in indiscriminate cutting
of surrounding forests in order to install housing and industrial parks, decreasing
protection of slopes and plateaus.

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In the 1960s, an earthquake and the progressive drop in the world’s coal
demand contributed to the deterioration of Coronel as an urban center, increasing
its environmental and social degradation. At the end of the 1970s, the city was
strongly contaminated due to the Concepción – Lota highway that longitudinally
crosses the city. With a collapsing downtown area, its mining industry dying, its
port with low activity, the population faced high poverty indexes (CASEN 2006)
This situation was especially difficult in the 1980s and 1990s with the definitive
and progressive closing of the coal mines, which were the principal source of
employment during the last 150 years.
At the end of the 20th century, Coronel’s environmental reality is
unsustainable principally because the principal public spaces in downtown have
been strongly degraded and the principal beach (Playa Blanca) has been strongly
impacted by industrial waste. The city’s linear development is structured around
axes, obligating extension of infrastructure and basic services without protecting
dunes, hillsides, and water courses [22]. Finally, from the mid-1990s until the
beginning of the 21st Century, the county has experienced a growing
development of new industrial productive activities. As a result, Coronel has a
distinct relation with communities neighboring Concepción, generating a new
development scenario now considered in the new County Planning instrument.




















Figure 2: Macro plan area regulator.
At present, due to demographic growth and its historical development,
Coronel is a city segmented between the older section (initial reticule) linked to
mining development and the newer sector (nearby neighborhoods) that emerged
in the 1970s as a response to the growing population dedicated to other
productive (industrial park) and service activities, resulting in sectored, partial
growth. It is a markedly linear, extensive city (central structure is 8 km in

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length) that grows towards the north, losing its centrality. Coronel extends
horizontally through publicly funded high-density neighborhoods (SERVIU),
which occupy almost the entire territory while offering scarce public spaces.
This growth towards the north of the territory has created commuting problems
as well as deficient roads, health and other infrastructures.
The County of Coronel has a habitable surface area of 10,187 hectares,
corresponding to 36.5% of the county. A total of 980 hectares of the habitable
surface area is actually used for housing, 907.5 hectares for industrial use, and
423 hectares corresponds to diverse types of port areas. As a result,
approximately 24% of the habitable surface area is available, and the sectors
corresponding to consolidated areas present higher occupation densities with the
periphery and sub-urban sectors presenting lower densities (between 5 and 1.5
hab/ha).
The Regulator Plan defines four macro-areas to regulate the County’s
territorial organization CONSOLIDATED AREA: This area defines and
promotes residential, productive, recreation, and mixed uses, favoring greater
density and growth.
URBAN EXTENSION AREA: These areas are located outside of the present
urban limit and whose densification will regularize already existing edifications
and the County’s consolidate urban growth.
SPECIAL RESTRICTION AND PROTECTION AREA: These areas are
developed in the sectors whose natural condition inhibits presence of urban
development. In this sense, the proposed Regulator Plan seeks to define the
areas with the greater vulnerability to natural risks, and consequently establishes
standards to regulate its uses. Special measures are included to encourage
development while assuring the habilitation and correction of the deficiencies
present. Additionally, these areas are defined to assure historic conservation or
due to the location of potable water, electric and prison services infrastructure.
3.2 Analysis of indicators
The indicators applied are: population density, soil use, distance from basic
services, urbanizable surface areas in areas unapt for urban growth, non-
constructed land, and protected land, population vulnerable to natural disasters,
surface area vulnerable to natural disasters, land protected for its natural value,
and population within 500 meters of green areas. The unit of analysis is the
regulator plan’s 5 zoning areas: Consolidated zones, urban extension zones,
restriction and protection zones, Productive activities and equipment areas, and
public space and green areas.
The average population density in Coronel’s urban area is the following. An
average of 31.1 hab/ha was found in consolidated areas, ranging between 80.32
hab/ha in residential zone 1 and 73.9 hab/Ha. In Residential zone 2. In contrast,
the expansion zones present an average density of 5.2 Hab/ha. When analyzing
the use mixture, the residential areas are found in the consolidated areas.
According to the parameters, there is not a homogeneous mixture of uses;
services are concentrated in consolidated areas. Nearness to both educational and
health services are located in two centralities, where a new central nucleus,

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located in the Camilo Olabarría sector, is clearly emerging and is becoming more
important than the traditional city center.
Among the more interesting criteria or indicators from the environmental
sustainability perspective are the natural risk areas and population with natural
risks. Our results generated by the IPT indicate that 67.2% of the actual urban
surface area presents natural risks, where 38.4% corresponds to the risk of mass
movement, 17% land sinking, and 11.8% to flooding. Additionally, a total of
91,469 personas are exposed to natural risks (INE, 2002), 16,862 persons
(18.4%) live in danger zones with the following characteristics: 12.4% risk of
mass movement and 5.6% risk of land sinking, where 4.6% of these are
simultaneously exposed to land sinking and mass movement and 7.8% are
located only in mass movement areas. Finally, 5% of urban Coronel faces the
possibility of flooding. The Plan defines 15.24% of the urban area as natural risk
protection areas, and thus 51.9% of the urban area that presents natural risks has
been maintained as a residential area.



















Figure 3: Distances to educational equipment.
4 Discussion
The indicator system provides a general vision with respect to the sustainability
conditions of the new urban limit in aspects exclusively territorial or spatial of
the city’s territorial model. The Plan’s efficacy and impacts in the aspects
measured will be observed in time, where sustainability is given by a set of
factors, independently of whether the Plan’s proposals for areas or infrastructure
are or not implemented.

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The definition of the Plan’s permitted and non-permitted uses does not
sufficiently transform the city’s possibility of sustainability. A regulator plan, in
addition to addressing in depth the aspects with respect to construction, it should
also indicate that proposed city model that responds to both economic and
housing pressures and is framed within a concept of sustainable urban planning.
With respect to the use of Geographic Information Systems in the obtainment
and modeling of indicators, information must be adequately obtained, an aspect
that is not completely addressed in Chilean planning instruments. At present, the
GIS data coming from the regulator plan require platforms that are inter-operable
between CAD and GIS as well as the possibility of correction between formats.
One solution could be the Geodatabase model, where the application of
topologies and metadata generation are more attractive.
The study pretends to be a contribution to the models evaluating sustainability
in cities, and fundamentally in urban planning of mid-sized cities, such as many
in Chile. These methodologies can be integrated into the IPT elaboration
process, and thus the zoning proposals will respond more efficiently to global
sustainability criteria. Since the Regulator Plan is a key instrument for city
development—indeed, it is the urban planning instrument with the most impact
and competence in a city’s development. Thus, it is increasingly necessary that
it become a strategic instrument based in a sustainable urbanism perspective
rather than just a plan that regulates the construction of urbanized and
urbanizable space.
5 Conclusions
This study worked with indicators that measure city sustainability. Although
these indicators are not new in their definition because there is a wide spectrum
and measurement types, they are novel in their application to territorial planning
of land use as proposed in Coronel’s PRC, especially in the measurements within
the zonings. The indicator system based in sustainable urban planning attributes
and in the territorial components of density, land use, and environmental quality
was interesting and perfectly applicable in any Chilean Communal Regulator
Plans. Coronel’s PRC defined urban land, urbanizable land, restricted and
protected land. Using the defined indicators, we were able to analyze its
coherence with the attributes of sustainable urban planning. Due to the lack of
future land use derived from the zonification, the sustainability evaluation
depends on the actual and future uses although it is unable to obtain greater
details on the proposed uses.
Even when the zone definitions in the respective ordinance includes permitted
land uses, prohibited land uses, occupation coefficient, densities, and property
surface areas, these specifications are not limited within the zones. In other
words, they are not spatially located on a map, and thus the proposed type of city
is not clearly observable.
The plan advances in certain sustainable urban planning aspects, such as the
conservation of cultural heritage, the restriction of industrial uses that are
incompatible with residential uses. However, one of the indicators that marked

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the analysis was the population in risk. There was prohibition of occupation in
areas considered to have natural risk or landscape value. However, there were
only weak restrictions for urban use on the coast, there was no concrete zoning
for flood risk areas or the restrictions were based on unreliable data.
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