Implementing the New Urban Agenda: a platform of Sustainable Urban Design Interventions (IDUS) in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)

With the aim of supporting the implementation of the NUA agreed at Habitat III, the Network of Sustainable Urban Development for Latin America and the Caribbean, REDEUS_LAC, aimed at selecting, disseminating and, where possible, monitoring Sustainable Urban Design Interventions (IDUS, for its acronym in Spanish) in the LAC Region. Aware of the complexity of determining the sustainability of urban interventions of different scale and scope, an international group of fifteen members of REDEUS_LAC with different experience -academics from social areas, urban planners, architects, economists, together with professionals from public and private sector organizations- have devised a peer review and evaluation system.

The design of such a system involved discussing both the traditional definitions of the term 'sustainable development' as well as the ‘resilience’ perspective to urban space. The consensual decision was to consider four dimensions –socio cultural, environmental, governance and economic– which were subsequently operationalized in 17 attributes. A rubric was designed considering that each blind evaluator qualifies them by awarding points and stars by dimension. Thus, a digital IDUS platform with two or more stars is built. This also considers the possibility that, later, comments and opinions regarding the subsequent sustainability of the work will be added, enriching the state of the art and promoting open and informed debate to all the sectors involved in the construction of the city.

The proposed article describes the sustainability evaluation system: the data matrix to post IDUS on the platform, the rubric, and the categorizations/typologies of IDUS determined up to now. Finally, as an example, three cases are presented according to their scale and type with their respective evaluations: one 'local replicable’ IDUS, another 'city unique', and finally a 'metropolitan/regional strategy' IDUS implemented in LAC.