Theme based comparison of international green neighbourhood assessment systems

Neighbourhood is widely recognized as a fundamental building block of a city, and a good starting point to create a truly sustainable community. Green neighbourhood is also broadly defined as being moderately dense, mixed-use, designed at a human scale, active and public transportation oriented and literally "green". A green neighbourhood assessment system is a tool that evaluates sustainability performance of a given neighbourhood against a set of criteria. This paper evaluates 20 main international green neighbourhood assessment systems in according to their sustainability coverage and features. Sustainability aspects used in this paper include transportation, infrastructure, ecology, resources, energy, community, location, economy and building. The results of this study show that community, resources and ecology are the three major sustainability aspects that applied in 18, 17 and 16 out of 20 assessment systems respectively. However, after assessing the sustainability aspects by their weightings in the assessment systems, the differences among them are reduced and their rate of importance in all the assessment systems became closer. Ecology, energy, transportation, resources and economy receive the highest weightings after affecting by their weightings and incredibly community dropped to the very low importance of weightings. Future research can be conducted on the implementation of several green neighbourhood assessment systems on actual projects and compare their capability in measuring the rate of greening.