Evaluating Environmental Impacts of Urban Development Strategies: A Case Study of the Fontaine d’Ouche District

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology used to analyze the environmental impacts of a product. Initially, it was applied to buildings only, but recently, it has also been applied to entire neighborhood. This expansion from individual buildings to the neighborhood scale requires additional inputs, such as the impacts of public spaces, transportation, public network systems, and roads. Additionally, conducting an LCA for a neighborhood requires software tools to simulate the neighborhood and databases to store the environmental impacts of all the components integrated into the neighborhood. This paper presents an LCA case study of a neighborhood in Dijon, France. The study aims to analyze the thermal impacts of buildings and the neighborhood with single-, double-, and triple-pane windows. The second part of the study involves two LCA studies using the 1996 version of ecoinvent. The first study is a continuation of the thermal simulation analysis, while the second study compares concrete, masonry, and timber-based construction designs for the neighborhoods. The results show that the heating demands inside the buildings are substantially reduced when transitioning from single- to triple-pane, while the cooling demands show the opposite effect. Furthermore, doubling the width of double-pane windows resulted in less profound environmental damage for the construction, use, and demolition phases compared to single-pane windows, with only the renovation phase being more damaging. Additionally, the comparison between different construction scenarios shows that the timber-based variant is slightly advantageous from an environmental point of view compared to the concrete and masonry designs.