Spatial neighborhood sustainability assessment for urban planning, Cuenca, Ecuador

The accelerated processes of urbanization produce an explosive occupation of the land, creating scattered cities, with great demands for infrastructure and high consumption of raw materials and energy, affecting natural territories and increasing the emission of pollutants. The city of Cuenca-Ecuador as well as several Latin American cities are not strangers to this problem, as it reflects a dispersed growth towards the peripheries that have caused an expansion of the urban landscape. The above situation requires sustainable planning, which contributes to decision-making to identify what measures are needed to regulate the growth of the city. Accordingly, the present research proposes combining the set of indicators of the Neighborhood Sustainability Assessment tool with the spatial analysis of GIS, so that the sustainability assessment can be extended at the city level to support urban planning in Cuenca. For this purpose, a 3-step methodology was proposed: selection of sustainable indicators, evaluation of sustainable performance, and design of a model that integrates SIG+NSA, which allowed incorporating spatial analysis in the sustainable assessment of neighborhoods, by designing a model adapted to Cuenca. This model consists of 15 variables, 12 indicators, and 4 evaluation categories, which result in the sustainable performance level of 149 planning sectors. The developed model makes it possible to automate the analysis processes and generate a complement to the ArcGIS geoprocessing tools for evaluating urban sustainability, as a support tool for planners and decision-makers in city planning processes.