Output details

Elucidating sustainability sequencing, tensions, and trade-offs in development decision making

This peer reviewed paper develops a conceptual mapping approach MODESTT (mapping sustainability objectives in decision making to elucidate sequencing tensions and trade-offs) analysing the critical sequencing of sustainability-related actions and decisions within a site development process. It is the result of cross disciplinary research/collaboration involving a consortium of investigators and researchers funded under the EPSRC SUE1 and 2 calls, drawn from the University of Birmingham, Birmingham City University and Coventry University, set within the wider context of investigating the enablers and barriers to achieving sustainable urban regeneration.

Using the RIBA Plan of work, research examines the decisions and activities inherent in delivering an element of a development (using the roof as an example) seeking the most sustainable outcome from what are, necessarily, a series of compromises in the design process, requiring the cooperation of many professions and other stakeholders as well as meeting multiple sustainability objectives. MODESTT is developed to help to anticipate and resolve, often seemingly unrelated, outcomes (eg economic versus environmental versus social) and is able to elucidate the interdependencies, tensions, and trade-offs between different sustainability objectives for a given development, and to make explicit the points at which a single design decision may `lock-in' or `lock-out' various possible outcomes. The analysis makes explicit the critical importance of the sequencing of actions, decisions and interdependencies between specific objectives that lead to tensions and trade-offs between the multiple sustainability objectives. It concludes by making recommendations for the generic application of the MODESTT approach to improve sustainability throughout the site development process. Regardless of the tools that are available in the UK or elsewhere for the development process and for sustainability proxies, it is the timing and sequencing of decisions (when data are collected or the tools are applied) that are important in delivering effective solutions.