Literature Review!

Literature Review!

Recognizing the critical role of neighborhoods as the front-line in sustainable cities, many initiatives have been undertaken to create sustainable neighborhood developments, and several tools have been developed to assess and rate the sustainability performance of these developments. In developing countries, even though several reports highlight the failures of sustainability [1], no research has been conducted on multiple developments and their performance using specific assessment and rating systems, especially in Myanmar.

Sharifi [5] stated that to fulfill the role of facilitator, the indicators must be integrated (cover multiple issues and consider the linkages between them) [6], forward looking (inter-generational equity), distributional (intra-generational equity), developed with input from multiple stakeholders (procedural equity) [6, 7], and context-specific. Here, the content analysis examined 148 indicators used in the three tools in terms of these five core characteristics to determine compliance.

When Shwe [8] investigated the weight and proportion of indicators, it was found that these three tools mainly focused on environmental issues being unbalanced in terms of the three sustainability dimensions, as shown in Fig. 1a. Across the nine sustainability categories, Shwe [8] also emphasized the weaknesses of the three tools in terms of indicator distributions. Although each tool should consider enough distribution in each category, they tend to focus on different targets. For example, CASBEE-UD does not account for location indicator and LEED-ND does not consider transportation indicator, as shown in Fig. 1b.