Chapter 8: Integrated Strategies for Sustainable Urban Development

PROPOLIS (Planning and Research for Land Use and Transport for Increasing Urban Sustainability) was a transnational research project conducted in the Key Action ‘City of Tomorrow and Cultural Heritage’ of the Fifth Framework Programme of Research and Technology Development of the European Union (EU). The objective of the PROPOLIS project was to research, develop and test land use and transport policies and assessment methodologies in order to find sustainable long-term urban strategies and to demonstrate their effects.

Indicators were developed for measuring the environmental, social and economic dimensions of sustainability. Values for these indicators were calculated using advanced urban land use and transport models and new geographical information system (GIS) modules. A decision-support tool was developed to evaluate the indicator values to arrive at single aggregate environmental, social and economic indices describing the policy options. The system was used to analyse policy options in seven European cities using three different land use and transport models. The results showed that, with growing traffic, environmental sustainability deteriorates in all case cities. Also, social sustainability tends to deteriorate.