Abstract
The sound development of city-regions presents a major planning challenge, as these regions are and will be the living spaces for the majority of the population. Therefore, a key question is how city-regions can be managed so that they develop in a sustainable way. Although Environmental Impact Assessment, Integrated Assessment, and other currently used approaches provide significant inputs for managing transition-processes towards sustainability, they must be extended to respond to three major deficiencies, which are (i) using lists of isolated indicators, (ii) not performing a consistency analysis of the targets to be achieved, and (iii) not utilizing the potential of transdisciplinary approaches. The authors present an approach to constructing Sustainability Solution Spaces for Decision-Making (SSP). This approach fulfils the systemic, normative, and procedural requirements of an appropriate sustainability assessment as elaborated in the technical literature. It provides a consistent set of targets considering the systemic relations among the indicators representing the city-region. This gives the decision-makers a concise guideline for sustainable decisions and makes them aware of the synergistic and contradictory effects of their decisions. The modular tool is first depicted as a general procedure and later differentiated into two transdisciplinary approaches, a participatory and an expert approach.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 589-608 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Environmental Impact Assessment Review |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 6 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2005 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- City-regions
- Decision support tool
- Sustainability assessment
- Sustainability indicators
- Target conflicts
- Transdisciplinarity
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Geography, Planning and Development
- Ecology
- Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law