A model for constructing sustainability assessment framework - focus on regional industrial land redevelopment

Sustainable development has become a critical issue for land use planning and management since the 1980s. Various sustainability assessment systems have been used to evaluate and promote sustainability in different scales. However, many literatures suggested that a sustainability assessment system should be project dependent and multi-scale structured. In the meanwhile, stagnating industrial land redevelopment process requires pro-active and cautious planning to mitigate pressures on the environment and competitions for precious land resource. Therefore the main problem to be solved in this paper is how to promote and evaluate regional sustainable industrial land redevelopment. A generalized model for constructing sustainability assessment framework is presented in this paper, with a focus on industrial land redevelopment for a region.

Based on literature study, there are several objectives to be reached for this general model. The assessment framework should be project dependent, multi-scale structured, multi-disciplinary, temporal and spatial dynamic with stakeholders’ involvement.

From project and region specific perspective, a thorough analysis of this region is important. In the industrial land use redevelopment case, reclassification of functions is necessary to gain more information about industrial land use. A goal is then defined together with stakeholders. After examining different frameworks, suitable indicators could be extracted together with stakeholders according to the goal. This is a repetitive process to eliminate bias from different disciplines. Moreover, the selection of indicators should base on four criteria as well, namely measureable, accountable, non-substitutable, and accessible. Finally a set of indicators should come from different disciplines namely society, environment and economy.

For multi-scale evaluation such as building level, project level and regional level, integration methods are needed. According to the goal that has been determined, aggregation criteria can be set as well. Using analytic hierarchy process, stakeholders can determine the weights of different indicators on the same level.

To calculate individual indicators, both short and long term effects should be taken into consideration, together with spatial effects. That means the evaluation should be dynamic and tempo-spatial oriented.

In this paper, the North Brabant region is used to illustrate how this model works. Since this is the starting phase of the research, only preliminary results are available at this moment. After analyzing current industrial land use situations, the goal is defined as to promote sustainable regional industrial land redevelopment with the balance among social, economic and environmental impacts.

Industry activities have their own characteristics based on different products, production processes, land demands, and energy consumptions. An adjusted classification is derived from Dutch Standaard Bedrijfsindelling. Services orientated activities such as retailing, transportation, information, financial and consultancy services are excluded from industrial land use at this stage, except industry related services. Several public facilities are also excluded like education, public administration, human health and recreational areas. In this reclassification, mining and quarrying industry, manufacturing industry and industry related services are listed in the main division. Each of them has several sectors as well for further elaboration.

Many sustainability assessment methods like EU standard framework, Dutch standard framework, and other sustainability assessment systems like LEED for buildings are reviewed for selecting suitable indicators based on our goal setting and industry land use reclassification. A matrix is made for the selected indicators. The matrix is constructed based on two disciplines. One is social, economic and environmental discipline, while the other is building, project and region scale discipline. The selected indicators are allocated in the matrix based on these two axes, and with a concern of tempo-spatial oriented criteria.

Further steps include the integration of these multi-scale indicators and the evaluation of these indicators, which require data collection and participatory planning. Since the method requires tempo-spatial dynamic assessment, land use change modeling and on-site design modeling are going to be performed for these indicators. Thus in this paper, we only present a method or model to construct such kind of sustainability assessment framework. This model contains several steps which would allow participatory planning and multi-scale, multi-disciplinary, tempo-spatial dynamic, context aware sustainability assessment.