Climate-Oriented Assessment of Main Street Design and Development in Budapest

Abstract

Main streets play pivotal role in urban areas in terms of economic, social, moreover environmental contexts. Such streets are generally situated in densely built-up areas, where the adverse effects of climate change, such as rising temperature and changing precipitation patterns occur emphatically. Increasing urban heat island effect or extreme amount of runoff water during severe storms and floods significantly decrease the adaptive capacity of a city, consequently its residents becoming more vulnerable. Therefore involving climate-oriented design principles into planning and construction phase contributes to reach more sustainable and climate-friendly open spaces what are strongly relevant especially in main streets which are designed for a great amount of people. Present study provides a criteria matrix for assessing the climate-friendly level of recently renewed main streets in Budapest. Due to this assessment tool the adaptation and mitigation performance of the selected projects can be evaluated. For identifying strengths and weaknesses of a given project, a rating scheme has been applied by selecting and using 42 indicators grouped into mitigation, adaptation and awareness raising categories. Thus planners, decision-makers and other stakeholders can easily define future opportunities and challenges, accordingly this study may contribute to take urban street design practices toward climate-friendliness by paying more attention on changing local weather patterns and related consequences.

Fenntarthatóság és klímaadaptáció a városfejlesztésben – lock-in elemzés Budapest XVII. kerületének példáján keresztül

“…A nemzetközi szakirodalomban tapasztalt fokozott érdeklődés a magyar nyelvű kutatásokat is ösztönözte a klímaadaptáció területén. Az éghajlati sérülékenység térbeli jellemzése (Farkas et al 2015;Uzzoli, Bán 2018) mellett a városokat és városfejlesztési folyamatokat érintő tanulmányok (Csete, Buzási 2016;Kohán et al 2011) egyaránt megtalálhatók a hazai szakirodalomban. Meg gyelhető azonban, hogy a fenntarthatóság és a klímaadaptáció területe mindeddig nem, vagy csak igen kis mértékben kapcsolódott össze az elvégzett kutatásokban.…”

A systematic review of indicators to assess the sustainability of road infrastructure projects

“…The two most frequently used criteria are socio-ecological system integrity and livelihood security and opportunity. The criterion socio-ecological system integrity is often used to develop indicators that refer to project effects across scales from climate change and ozone layer depletion at a global scale [11,24,48,55,71], to soil and local water quality at a fine spatial scale [45,60,81]. The criterion socio-ecological system integrity is associated with the indicators concerning the mitigation of species habitat fragmentation, land use management, and pollution prevention.…”

Moving toward sustainability and circularity in hill road construction: a study of barriers, practices and performance

“…This implies that roads should be able to tackle the problems arising from climate and other natural disasters (Csete and Buzasi, 2016).…”