How can development plans promote the sustainability of construction projects?

The increasing demands on sustainability require a reorientation in neighborhood and building planning that takes into account various criteria from different areas. Early planning decisions in particular have a significant influence on the later sustainability performance of construction projects. Development plans are a suitable instrument for considering and ultimately defining tangible sustainability requirements for future neighborhood quarters and buildings at municipal level. A multi-layered model-based approach was developed for this purpose, which can be seen as a link between municipal neighborhood development and the subsequent building planning. Based on identified development plan parameters, a two-stage semi-automated process is used to perform a multi-criteria (ecological, economic and social) sustainability assessment. Initially, the parametric building envelope is generated based on the assumed development plans boundary conditions. In the second step, this is linked with component assemblies, materials, social, cost and environmental parameters. This process is repeated for various compliant scenarios and the results are then compared to determine the Pareto optimum for various criteria. In this way, the potential of the sustainability requirements defined in development plans can be clarified and the influence of early consideration and comparison of different scenarios for municipal urban and neighborhood development can be demonstrated. Advancing standardization (system, management and technical standards) and digitalization (data availability) in the field of neighbourhood planning and development will allow the potential to be further exploited in the future.