Sustainability Assessment of Residential Urban Areas: An Early Warning Analysis

Constructing and improving residential urban areas is an eternal critical topic in the whole territorial development process. The creation of residential urban areas, which relates to human beings, social relations and activities, artificial structures, the regional environment and ancillary facilities, is connected to a series of challenges and problems, such as population pressure, environmental pollution, public safety, etc., which have to be dealt with carefully. The concept of sustainable development has highlighted the impossibility of separating environment from development. For this reason, sustainability assessment should be based on multidisciplinary approaches that reflect the complex network of interactions between human and environmental systems. This paper aims at integrating two different approaches in the sustainability assessment context: the environmental indicator systems and the early warning analysis. The objective is to provide a tool that is able to inform the Decision Maker on whether residential urban areas are developing sustainably and healthily or not, and on how to prevent them in advance from suffering too much or developing too quickly. The work discusses how to establish appropriate early warning indicators and which methods and modeling can be used for the final analysis. In order to give more substance to the dissertation, the paper considers an application to a real case concerning the development of a new residential area in China.