Urban facilities management: A systemic process for achieving urban sustainability

Abstract

With cities at the forefront of the challenge of achieving global sustainability, a key concern for urban management bodies is to identify ways to promote sustainable development at the urban and suburban level. Assessment mechanisms have dominated this field for the past two decades, and sustainable community assessment tools (SCATs) are fast becoming the principal framework adopted by urban planners and developers to drive sustainability. This paper investigates the efficacy and applicability of this approach to urban sustainability. The study aims to establish that the deployment of a management platform, founded in the principles of facilities management (FM), can provide better mechanisms to facilitate the process of achieving urban sustainability. The data were collected by means of survey interviews with key stakeholders who consisted of two main categories: participants from private and public sector engaged in the management and development of sustainable cities. Secondly, developers of the tools were interviewed. The tools evaluated include: LEED for Neighbourhood Development (LEED-ND), BREEAM Communities (BREEAM-C), CASBEE for Urban Development (CASBEE-UD), and Green Star Communities (GSC). It was found that the prescriptive and outcomes-based nature of assessment tools do not adequately accommodate institutional and social imperatives of urban sustainability. Additionally, a need for more a robust procedural framework to manage relationships between the various relevant professionals and interest groups was highlighted. This would provide a unified method to facilitate the achievement of urban sustainability. The paper concludes that urban sustainability needs to draw upon the management principles of FM to facilitate more comprehensive development and assessment relevant to the needs of a specific locale. Without a process-oriented method such as this, cities will continue to fall short of their sustainable imperatives.

A Critique of the Application of Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment Tools in Urban Regeneration

“…There are a number of concerns about approaching complex development challenges through the simplified application of metrics. Many argue that such mechanisms undermine meaningful attempts to examine the structures and processes that define urban development and sustainability [7,8].…”

“…Various studies on NSA tools found that they are fundamentally dominated by environmental criteria [4,12,16,36,37,39]. As a result, NSA techniques "gloss over" considerations for social and economic aspects of sustainability [5], and the human factor of sustainability is vastly under-represented [8]. Hence, sustainability assessment has been unable to capture what makes the built environment sustainable for its citizens [14], and assessment rarely provides information that is relevant to manage the behavior of individuals [39,44].…”

“…Consequently, this means that the tools are based on criteria defined by urban designers and planners. Hence, frameworks are implemented using experts and largely ignore local knowledge or values [8,36,37]. The False Creek project was also criticised for its lack of engagement of youth and non-English speaking members of the public.…”

“…NSA tools have shown an inability to address the interaction between humans and their space, and the social structures that are the essence of a "neighborhood" [2]. Thus, many reports have highlighted that institutional sustainability is the least emphasized category of NSA tools [6,8,36]. Whilst in theory the tools offer an integrative framework [37], in practice they lack enough procedural clarity to meaningfully guide interaction between the various urban role players.…”

“…Whilst NSA tools have had a positive impact on the sustainability of the built environment and have mainstreamed green innovation in neighborhood development, recent studies have highlighted various issues with NSA tools. Essentially, the tools represent a technically based outlook of urban sustainability that prioritize measurable aspects that largely ignore strategies that pay wider recognition to the depth of issues related to sustainability [8]. The result is that NSA tools promote a rigid brand of urban sustainability which is characterized by green technologies and design.…”