Integrating sustainability issues at the neighborhood scale
Suburban Polarity © Olivier Wavre / LAST / EPFL
Within a context marked by the processes of the densification of urban territories, the creation of new neighborhoods in line with the sustainability transitions constitutes a complex challenge. In an article published in the last issue of the URBIA journal, the Laboratory of Architecture and Sustainable Technologies (LAST) presents a decision-making support methodology, based on its recent research, which allows comparing several projectual visions.
The holistic nature of sustainability has led to radical changes in architectural and urban design practices. The increasing complexity that results from this enforces the need for simple, reliable, graphical assessment tools to support decision-making and communication among the different stakeholders from the early stages of the project. The NEBIUS (Neighborhood-scale Evaluation to Benchmark the Integration of Urban Sustainability) methodology, developed within the framework of teaching and research activities, aims to optimize, assess, and compare urban and architectural visions from a sustainability perspective, provides an innovative framing of these challenging issues.
This paper more specifically presents the third application of NEBIUS on a suburban site in West Lausanne (Switzerland), a section of the city that is particularly emblematic of challenges linked with the creation of new suburban polarities. The results of this experience represent a baseline from which other sustainable neighborhood projects, located in diverse territories – urban, suburban, peri-urban – can be compared and assessed, whether in academic or operational contexts.