Integrated assessment of urban sustainability at East Lake

CSIRO researchers are developing a software platform to integrate sustainability assessment across urban domains including health, water, transport and energy.

• 26 November 2008 | Updated 14 October 2011

Background

Urban planning and design professionals seeking to address specific urban sustainability issues have seen the tools available multiply.

But there has not been a platform to bring these tools together to tackle the complex and interconnected challenges facing our cities.

A solution is now being developed by CSIRO researchers, as part of a collaborative project with the Australian Capital Territory Government, to create a sustainable urban renewal showcase at East Lake, Canberra.

Working prototype

CSIRO researchers are developing a prototype platform to integrate sustainability assessment across domains, including health, water, transport and energy.

This integrated sustainability assessment platform is unique because it:

• focuses on early stages of urban planning such as structure and concept planning, to explore the flow-on consequences of decisions
• looks at multiple scales of influence (precinct, lot, building) and links between these scales
• adopts a performance-based approach to sustainability assessment, grounded in science, that leaves the subjectivity of sustainability rating and benchmarking to others.

Integrated assessment

The end result is a tool for testing planning alternatives in the conceptual stages and testing urban performance across multiple domains including energy, water, transport and health.

Users can develop, test and analyse the sustainability performance of alternative planning scenarios early in the planning process.

CSIRO expert knowledge is built into the knowledge-base to support robust assessment of sustainability performance.

Two or three-dimensional spatial models linked into Geographic Information Systems (GIS), urban and building information models, and sustainability assessment algorithms provide an integrated digital urban information environment, allowing easy 3 dimensional (3D) visualisation of planning scenarios and assessments in Google Earth.

Future development 

Future development plans for the platform include:

• incorporating new domains, such as biodiversity, materials and waste
• improving the 'look and feel' of the web-based user interface
• advanced 3D visualisation and a collaborative virtual environment.

Read more about the East Lake urban renewal project.