An explorational case study towards an integrated Environmental -and Social Framework to Assess the Impact related to high rise buildings in the Netherlands in a dense urban area due to urban transitions.
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Last Updated: 10-2020
Due to increasing urbanization a new approach is needed for urban planning. Besides, urban environments become more complex. This growth does not come without any impacts and consequences in and around urban areas; problems arise such as mobility issues, clean water shortage, pollution, traffic congestion, housing issues, and urban expansion. To encounter the urbanization high-rise buildings will be constructed and severe impacts will follow. In order to assess such impacts, impact assessments exist such as an EIA. However, the EIA has well known continuous flaws in practice. Therefore a new approach is needed and the ESIM tool is developed. This tool determines the compatibility of different land-use functions indicated by fourteen environmental and social impact criteria. This compatibility is firstly calculated in the horizontal and vertical direction and this will finally lead to a compatibility value of the high-rise building for each floor and each impact criteria. A case study and scenario analysis are applied to find the optimal building within a city center area. The results show that a monofunctional building (e.g. office, residential buildings) have high compatibility on the social impact criteria, but low for environmental aspects. A mix of land use functions within a high rise building shows a relatively ‘good’ compatibility on all impact criteria. However, to improve the study some improvements could be mentioned. Such as inclusion of social experts, an overview of detailed land use functions rather than major land use functions, the involvement of stakeholders for weight determination of impact criteria, and the use of Python combined with QGIS.