TOOL NAME: LESS – Local Area Envisioning and Sustainability Scoring System
OWNED/DEVELOPED BY: HASSELL Pty Ltd
- Form of the CAT – whether it is a rating tool, strategic framework, guidelines etc. – and capacity to link with other tools.
LESS is an integrated urban sustainability assessment framework. It functions as both a rating tool and a strategic framework, operating in two modes – a rating mode and a design/modelling (“free-running”) mode.
LESS includes indicators from social, economic and environmental domains - other domains such as infrastructure, governance etc can be included for assessment as per requirement.
- Governance/administration of the CAT – its purpose and the organization behind it, the jurisdiction or scale of influence/application.
The tool is being developed by HASSELL, a multi-disciplinary design practice structured around the key disciplines of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture and planning, with integrated sustainability and urban design capabilities.
LESS is designed to assist built environment professionals and stakeholders to identify and understand the issues relevant to sustainability within the urban environment – to assess and quantify the state of a set of stakeholder-defined sustainability parameters, to set goals and monitor performance progress, and to facilitate consensus for decision making.
HASSELL currently owns and manages the IP of the tool, with the intention of exploring options for making LESS commercially available for broader use by individuals and other organizations in the future.
LESS has currently been pilot-tested on a number of in-house design projects, with results applied to review and further development of the tool.
- Sector or phase of development to which the CAT is applicable – e.g. planning, design, construction – residential, commercial, infrastructure etc. – including capacity to influence urban renewal and retrofitting outcomes.
Tool can be applied across a range of development types and scales, in the planning and design phases, as well as post-construction evaluation. Addresses performance of existing settlements – both existing fabric and operational capacity – thus has powerful capacity for use in analysing urban retrofitting scenarios.
- Ability to promote systems thinking – how well the CAT encompasses and integrates the component factors and measures of urban sustainability.
LESS is based on a systems-thinking approach to sustainability assessment. It allows the monitoring, mapping and measurement of stakeholder-derived indicators from four fields of relevance to local government areas: environment, socio-economic, infrastructure and governance.
The assessment of chosen indicators is conducted by taking into account the priorities and aspirations of a local government and community (so users can create customised systems for examining particular issues based on locally specific data & indicator sets – e.g. sustainable green infrastructure, health, trade & education etc. – all measuring capacity against social, environmental and economic performance).
The framework is used to create a unified/weighted index (on a scale of 0 to 10) to indicate the state of performance or ‘health’ in each field, in addition to a combined ranking taking into account all four fields (based on the Drivers-Pressure-State-Impact-Response DPSIR concept).
Tool derives its power from an integrated approach to data management and environmental management understanding. Outputs for all measures are reduced to simple numbers – in terms of relationship to benchmarks (-5 to +5), freeing up decision-makers from complexity.
- Capacity to inform design decisions – how well the CAT is able to derive and test alternative design strategies to inform decision-making.
Tool specifically designed to enhance this capacity – it can measure existing performance and projected outcomes of a range of alternative project scenarios. The dual rating and ‘free-running’ modes address the potential for user motivation/inputs to influence skewed outcomes – the rating mode effectively addresses issues of bias.
Over time, the tool framework has capacity to become more ‘intelligent’, via increasing stored data/solutions in the memory/knowledge base.
- Capacity to encourage collaboration – how effectively the CAT integrates input from multiple stakeholders in the context of its implementation and use.
In pilot testing, practice standard involves a collaborative process with stakeholders for defining indicator sets. Processes for incorporating this within any future commercial application of the tool are not yet documented – but tool developers state that it is intended that stakeholder collaboration be incorporated as a primary feature of implementation and use.
- Adaptability of the CAT to differing local environmental contexts
The tool is extremely flexible in this regard - indicator sets are always locally derived, and effective outcomes rely on context-specific data. It is designed to be applicable internationally. The rating mode is currently Australian-specific, but has inherent capacity to be applied in an international context.
- Ability of the CAT to drive innovation in urban planning and development.
The tool developers state that LESS is not designed to ‘drive’ innovation per se, but rather to allow opportunities for introspection in decision-making – i.e. to build capacity by enhancing understanding of the parameters of a given problem. In this way, the tool is designed to empower decision-makers, via revealing analysis complementarities and tradeoffs, setting targets and ‘backtracking’ to derive solutions – thereby increasing opportunities for innovative design to emerge, rather than be ‘driven’.
The notion of building innovation capacity is also implicit in the ‘rating’ (strict, not innovative) vs. ‘free-running mode’ aspects of the tool, with the latter encouraging informed experimentation (increasing potential for innovation).
- Flexibility of the CAT to adapt and evolve over time to changing understanding and measures of urban sustainability – including review processes and systems for ongoing monitoring, evaluation and reporting of outcomes.
Unable to be assessed from available information – although the tool is designed to be inherently flexible and customized for individual application – i.e. the ‘free-running mode’ is dependent on creativity and intelligent inputs by users, and is intended to optimize evaluation capacity.
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