1. Introduction
Sustainability is a multi-dimensional concept that takes into
account different elements of territorial development, such as
economic growth, well-being of population, environmental quality,
etc [1]. Since the early ‘90s many countries and international
organizations have been working on sustainable development
assessment by means of specific indicators [2e4]. With specific
reference to urban areas, the indicator approach is useful to give
information about the sustainability condition of the system under
examination and it can be used in order to make previsions about
future sustainably trends [5e7]. Urban residential areas, facing
restriction by social-economic level, environmental pressure,
population pressure and traffic pressure, etc, also attract growing
attentions nowadays as an important component of sustainability
study. This is of particular importance in the context of emerging
countries, where large urban development are going on very
quickly and the necessity of tools being able to predict the future
sustainability levels is real.
This paper proposes an integrated GISSD analysis system
(GISSD) mainly consisting of Geographical Information System
(GIS) analysis, System Dynamics (SD) model and 3D visualization.
GISSD system covers sustainability assessment of urban residential
development and spatial distribution analysis of residential buildings
based on sustainability indicators categorized in four groups,
namely housing, society, economics and environment. The GISSD
approach is characterized by three main advantages: (a) its capacity
to explore the housing equilibrium utilizing sustainability indicators.
(b) its economic-social-environmental features especially on
residential buildings. (c) the visualization of the simulation data in
GIS technology.
System Dynamics is a realistic tool for sustainability assessment,
utilized to better understand the sustainable development in
a considered period and forecast the future trends, while GIS
provides a consistent visualization environment for displaying the
input data and results of a model which is a very useful ability in
a decision-making process. Although this is a hard task to forecast
the future evolution for assisting policy makers due to the