Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Land Use Policy journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landusepol Integrating GIS spatial dimension into BREEAM communities sustainability assessment to support urban planning policies, Lisbon case study Joana Pedro a, ⁎ , Carlos Silva a , Manuel Duarte Pinheiro b a IN+Center for Innovation, Technology and Policy Research, Instituto Superior Técnico – Universidade de Lisboa, Avenida Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal b Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture and Georesources, Instituto Superior Técnico – Universidade de Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais 1, 1049-001, Lisbon, Portugal ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Sustainable urban planning Sustainability assessment Urban development BREEAM-Communities GIS ABSTRACT Local governments face increasing pressure to define land-use policies to enhance local sustainable development. This requires the development of urban planning tools that can help them in selecting measures and priority intervention areas within their cities. The tools currently available only address this problem partially. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) have been widely used in urban planning for handling spatial data but have limited capacities for representing choice and priority among the conflicting objectives for sustainable urban planning. Meanwhile, urban sus- tainability assessment systems, such as BREEAM-Communities (BREEAM-CM), can help to choose the most sustainable measures under such conflicting objectives, although they are typically non-spatial by assuming a spatial homogeneity within the study area, therefore, they cannot be used to identify priority intervention lo- cations. This paper proposes bridging the gap between urban sustainability assessment and spatial analysis by com- bining GIS and BREEAM-CM. Instead of the traditional use of BREEAM-CM to assess a single neighbourhood, we applied this system to all Lisbon city subsections with the support from GIS. It resulted in the identification of priority intervention areas for sustainable development within the city including: attracting new businesses to the north area; implementing energy efficiency strategies and new green areas in the old town and central avenues; and improving public transport links in the north and western areas. These findings show that the proposed model can be a valuable tool for evaluating and defining local sustainable development strategies. 1. Introduction Over recent years, the rapid growth of cities and their increasing demand for scarce resource have opened the debate on the role of local government in enhancing sustainability (Broto, 2017; Reckien et al., 2017). The concept of sustainable development was first introduced in the Brundtland report in 1987 (WCED, 1987), which defines sustain- ability as the "appropriate rate of development that meets people's standard needs without compromising future generations". Subsequent to this report, the Rio Conference 1992 (UN, 1993) introduces the re- lationship between economics, science and the global environment within a political context. Since then, there have been notable efforts made by member states to incorporate sustainability principles into international actions and agreements (Adinyira et al., 2007), including the 2020 Smart Strategy for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth (European Commission, 2010), and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2017) that established 17 global objectives to be adopted by all parties of the United Nations. These international agreements set a shared plan of action to ensure social cohesion, en- vironmental protection and prosperity worldwide. Nevertheless, the implementation and success of these plans will rely on local govern- ments own sustainable development policies, plans and programmes (Broto, 2017; Reckien et al., 2017; Yigitcanlar and Kamruzzaman, 2018). In light of this, urban planning becomes an essential tool that can help local governments define land-use policies to enhance local sus- tainable development (Eraydin and Tasan-Kok, 2015; Etingoff, 2017). From the perspective of urban planning, sustainable development is a spatial decision problem that requires selecting which measures and where to implement them in a context of often conflicting objectives (Cajot et al., 2017; Della Spina et al., 2017). For instance, selecting the most suited incentives and priority intervention areas to achieve energy https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2019.02.003 Received 12 September 2018; Received in revised form 17 January 2019; Accepted 1 February 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: joana.m.pedro@tecnico.ulisboa.pt (J. Pedro), carlos.santos.silva@tecnico.ulisboa.pt (C. Silva), manuel.pinheiro@tecnico.ulisboa.pt (M.D. Pinheiro). Land Use Policy 83 (2019) 424–434 0264-8377/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T