Quantitative Assessment in Sustainable Digital Urban Planning using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis

Sammanfattning: Mass migration to cities has led to a a huge increase in research into urban environmentalsustainability, its assessment and methods to improve it. This thesisfocuses on the theme of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in digitalurban planning. It addresses the question of how useful such methods wouldbe in quantitative assessment of the environmental sustainability potential ofurban areas in the planning stage. This paper discusses potential methods tobuild an environmental sustainability scoring system for urban areas, choosesthe most promising and applies it to a case study urban area. This is intendedto be a proof of concept piece on whether the application of MCDA to digitalurban planning is feasible and useful. This method is then evaluated basedon its limitations, consistency, robustness to changes in input and on the opinionsof experts in the fields of sustainability and digital urban planning. Itis found that the method proposed, a combination of the AHP and MAUTdecision analysis methods, has several advantages in creating representativesustainability scores and incorporating expert opinions, but is difficult to scaleto include many criteria and requires a high level of input. It is suggested thatfurther research in this area into more scalable MCDA methods would be beneficial,and increasing the reliability and availability of urban environmentaldata would be highly useful for this field.