Comprehensive Assessment of Water Sensitive Urban Design Practices based on Multi-criteria Decision Analysis via a Case Study of the University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract

Water sensitive urban design (WSUD), as a typical green stormwater infrastructure (GSI), contains various facilities to decrease the urbanization impacts and enhance the values of amenity, ecosystem, and livability in Australia. Although WSUD has developed over 30 years, existing studies for WSUD performances have sometimes ignored its economic and social benefits, and there is still a lack of an integrated framework to optimize the GSI combinations based on various criteria in a site. This paper aims to utilize “score-rank-select” strategy to comprehensively assess WSUD combination scenarios from functional, economic, social, and environmental aspects, by taking the University of Melbourne (Parkville campus) as a case study. In detail, multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) was used for weight determination and scenario comparison. The results showed that scenario 4 with 52% green WSUD facilities had the highest assessment score (0.771) among the five scenarios, while the final score (0.758) of scenario 5 was lower than scenario 4 although its green facility proportion reached 69%. The trade-off relation between the proportion of grey and green WSUD facilities was further demonstrated. Additionally, this paper strongly recommends that the MCDA-based comprehensive assessment framework described here can be generally promoted for the water sector to solve the decision-making problems. The use of such a framework can further promote sustainable development by helping water managers to make informed and inclusive decisions involving a variety of factors.

Redefinition of Park Design Criteria as a Result of Analysis of Well-Being and Soundscape: The Case Study of the Kortowo Park (Poland)

“…In addition to acoustic valor of greenery in university campuses that is marked in our research, it should be considered as one element in a more complex environmental system, where soundscape together with water management [ 73 ], energy consumption [ 74 ], or climate mitigation actions [ 75 ] can create academic campuses as sustainable educations hubs influencing the surrounding and promoting a built environment of 21st century. Such actions in redesigning academic campuses according to modern urbanization concepts can be observed in many countries around the globe like France [ 76 ], Spain [ 77 ], Italy [ 78 ], Poland [ 79 ], Germany [ 70 ], Finland [ 80 ], US [ 81 ], Turkey [ 82 ], India [ 83 ], China [ 84 ], Singapore [ 85 ], Malaysia [ 86 ], or Brazil [ 87 ].…”

Landslide Susceptibility Assessment and Future Prediction with Land Use Change and Urbanization towards Sustainable Development: The Case of the Li River Valley in Yongding, China

“…It facilitates the breakdown of a problem into a hierarchy of more easily comprehended sub-problems, each of which can be analyzed independently. The method employs pairwise comparisons for ranking and prioritizing the importance of various elements, thereby allowing for both qualitative and quantitative evaluation [58][59][60][61]. Notably, the AHP's effectiveness in weight calculation does not necessitate information on the landslide distribution, enabling the derivation of more accurate weights for fundamental geological and environmental conditions, unaffected by the clustering of landslides due to human activities.…”

Development of a Multicriteria Scheme for the Identification of Strategic Areas for SUDS Implementation: A Case Study from Gijón, Spain

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