Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment Tools and a Comparative Analysis of Five Different Assessment Tools

Abstract

The search for finding solutions for urban problems led to the emergence of efforts to apply the concept of sustainability to cities and hundreds of assessment tools have been developed to assess the sustainability from buildings to neighborhoods and urban scales. Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment (NSA) tools, which examine the buildings together with their environments and evaluate the topics like society, land usage, transportation, water, air, energy and biologic diversity as a whole economically, environmentally and socially, are the tools that have been presented in recent years and started to be recognized and used very recently. In this study, it was aimed to introduce relatively mostly known 5 NSA tools, reveal the differences and similarities among them through various comparisons and make an assessment. The main point of the study was comprised of determining the approach differences between the systems in respect of the main goals of sustainability through the comparison of each system's main category and criteria in terms of scope, number and scoring. With this study, the world literature that is quite limited on this topic will be developed and contribution will be made to increase the awareness of the topic. It is also aimed to contribute establishing an assessment tool in Turkey.