Planning Sustainable Cities

It has become central to the Zofnass Program to educate people to make the right choices for sustainable projects and achieve best performance. Based on the sustainability assessment of individual projects, the Zofnass research team has started developing The Zofnass Planning Guidelines for Sustainable Cities for contemporary city planning practice – for new, expanding as well as existing urban developments. Our approach addresses the city as a sustainable organization of integrated infrastructure systems: waste, transportation, energy, water, landscape, information, food.

Through a holistic and inter-disciplinary approach, the Zofnass Tool addresses aspects of environmental, social, and economic sustainability for each infrastructure system. A significant part of the research process is the interaction and elaboration of findings with experts from the leading infrastructure firms in the US. Finally, the infrastructure systems are interrelated through their synergies and inter-dependencies.

Prof. Spiro Pollalis, Research Director, pollalis@gsd.harvard.edu
Richa Shukla, Research Associate & contact person for this project, rshukla@gsd.harvard.edu