Architecture Commons^™

Regional Land Pattern Assessment: Development Of A Resource Efficiency Measurement Method, Elizabeth Brabec, Geoffrey Mcd Lewis

Elizabeth Brabec

Debate on the sustainability of human settlements has recently been focused primarily on the urban portion of the land use pattern. However, urban areas rely on suburban, rural, and other less densely settled lands for their existence. In order to quantify the impacts of various land patterns on their supporting resources, these exurban lands must be included in any sustainability assessment. This need for a regional view has resulted in a measurement method that enables comparisons of relative sustainability between various regional land use patterns. Existing methods employed to assess urban sustainability are reviewed and compared with the regional characteristic …