Toward More Livable Community in Developing Countries; Through Sustainable Development of Infrastructures

Pursuing sustainable development can provide the right solution to confront the social and environmental challenges which developing countries are faced with today. Environmental issues are related to conservation and improvement of physical, biological and ecosystem resources, as addressing the relationship between nature and human. The social aspect is related to human communication, well-being, health and education, equity and poverty elimination. As these two aspects are not separate, there should be a comprehensive attitude to achieve sustainability in communities. Since infrastructures are essential to the survival of the communities, their sustainable development will provide the efficient usage of limited resources, while maximizing social benefits and reducing negative effects on the environment. Considering the importance of environment conservation and preventing further degradation, along with the development of social capabilities, there is a need to develop and implement systems with the goal of assessing infrastructures performance in terms of sustainability. This research aims at developing and localizing a sustainability rating system for infrastructures (based on the Envision system) in Iran, as a developing country. The focus is on the Quality of Life , Natural World and Resource Allocation groups of credits, which are most related to the social and environmental aspects. The results show an overall increase in new weights of the abovementioned groups highlighting the need to pay more attention to these aspects. Using weighted averages, new points have been defined for credits, which can be used to assess the sustainability of Iran s infrastructure projects.

Keywords:

Infrastructure Development , Sustainability , Developing Countries , Rating System , Envision