Non-Weighting Assessment Model: a New Tool for Sustainable Urban Landscape Planning

Abstract

The ecological sustainability assessment of urban landscape planning plays a critical role in sustainable urban development. In view of the shortcomings of the weighting-based ecological assessment systems, this paper establishes a basic assessment model based on non-weighting method. This is achieved by building core index of urban landscape ecological efficiency and introducing a unified measurement of ecological footprint. Afterwards, we discussed the application problems of the basic models, such as boundary conditions and index system, as well as the calculation of corresponding index, and so on. The present study also puts forward the main contents for further study, including the relevance between planning factors and ecological characteristics, planning schemes and their ecological significance, assessment procedures, and so on.

Sustainability assessment: the state of the art

“…This suggests that interest in sustainability assessment is going to continue to grow, and therefore we might hope to see significantly increased levels of practice in the future. The majority of the practice identified in these papers relates to very specific applications, sometimes to a product line (for example, Zhou et al 2012, for fuels), an organization (for example, Waheed et al 2011, for a University), the development of new tools (for example, Deng et al 2012) or a sector (for example, Shields et al 2011, for the minerals sector). That is, the majority of publications on sustainability assessment relate to specific, one-off, case studies and not to general practice or to the conceptual advancement of the field.…”