Social criteria to develop an in use holistic urban sustainable assessment tool: UHU2SAT

Abstract

Recently, several urban sustainability assessment tools (USAT) have appeared to reduce the human impact provided by the built environment. Few of them focus on the assessment of urban spaces like squares, streets, and parks, etc., but they don't operation and maintenance (OM) phase is not considered. It would be necessary to develop an in use holistic urban sustainable assessment tool (UHU2SAT) to specifically assess urban spaces under OM phase. This paper provides a qualitative research among 188 studies, with the aim to classify them according to the impacts they pursue: environmental (ENV), social (SOC) economic (ECO) and Others. Finally, the SOC criteria are reduced up to 21 and arranged into 4 different groups: Human comfort, Urban mobility, SOC Cohesion, and Health & safety. These SOC criteria have been discussed and revised according to the literature review to identify the most suitable indicators for the UHU2SAT. Finally, it can be concluded that this methodology could also be useful to obtain ENV and ECO criteria to provide a holistic assessment of the sustainability.