AN INTEGRATED LIFE CYCLE THINKING-BASED FRAMEWORK FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT OF URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS

According to the UN report 2014, more and more people are migrating from rural area to urban area which is expected to increase with the passage of time. But this unmanageable expansion causes negative environmental, economic and social impactsoncities which arethe biggest challenge to sustainability. There are different aspects that influence city metabolism and its sustainability like infrastructures, transportation, aging of building, energy consumption, etc. Employing effective management of urban infrastructure is one of the main ways to ensure sustainability and provide good living condition to the citizens. The central goal of this thesis is to propose a life cycle thinking based sustainability assessment framework for the evaluation of urban infrastructures which will guide the policy and decision makers in their decisions for the evaluation of sustainable development through a set of sustainability criteria and indicators. In order to identify the main requirements of the proposed sustainability assessment framework for urban infrastructure, first, a qualitative literature review of current sustainability approaches developed or applied in the built infrastructure context has been carried out. Then the main findings of the literature review have been used as inputs to design the proposed integrated framework. The framework is composed of three sections: (i) project structuring (ii) project analysis (iii) resolution/implementation. Finally, the most critical part of the proposed framework (Identification of key criteria and indicators) has been implemented in the context of Middle East countries, specifically UAE and Saudi Arabia, infrastructure projects, in order to test the applicability of the proposed sustainability assessment framework.