Sustainability Assessment and Feasibility Analysis: Towards Reflexive Foresight and Financial Scrutiny
14 Pages Posted: 15 Jul 2014 Last revised: 23 Jul 2016
Date Written: July 14, 2014
Abstract
Globally, regional cities will bear the brunt of future economic growth. Planning foresight and intelligent policy is needed to dampen malignant growth proclivities and, instead, facilitate sustainable urban development (‘SUD’). But policy makers can struggle to conceptualise, never mind enforce, a comprehensive approach to SUD. Notwithstanding, it is clear that urban infrastructure or mixed-use building projects need some form of intelligent vetting. One tool for ex ante SUD scrutiny blends a sustainability assessment (‘SA’) with a robust project feasibility analysis (‘FA’). The research investigates the merits of a blended conceptual framework (‘SA-FA’) to evaluate urban construction projects. Its first, sustainable, stage is reflexive strategic and contextualised place consideration, stakeholder dialogue and multi-criteria project review. Next, structural risks are translated into financial ones via financial risk diagnostics and analytics. The framework was tested on a mixed-use development case study in regional England. We found that using SA-FA tightens project analysis but also confirmed the conceptual and practical limitations of multi-criteria vetting and financial modelling to evaluate urban regeneration projects with strategic sustainability and public realm spinoffs in complex, dynamic systems with information asymmetry.
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