The trend towards green developments misses a clear definition of such concepts, though sustainability requires a more precise management of such important issues like climate change, exhaust of resources, pollution and waste. Life cycle assessment (LCA) constitutes a useful tool in order to help decision makers reducing environmental impacts by appropriate design. For instance the proposed concept of net energy producing building may lead to reduce the density of a city, thus increasing the need of transport. LCA could be applied in order to study a global balance and search for an adapted synthesis or optimization. Evaluating a set of indicators, LCA provides a more global assessment than a single criteria method like the ecological footprint or CO2 emissions. Its sensitivity to many parameters allows a decision aid to be provided to many actors like : municipalities and associated technical services, property developers, architects, contractors and users. This method is applied in many countries to study buildings, e.g. 8 tools have been compared in the European thematic network PRESCO. LCA has been applied in Germany to city districts, but for global studies and not as a design aid. The present project proposes therefore to develop an eco-design tool for urban settlements. The work programme includes the following phases. 1 Elaboration of specifications Experiences of green settlements will be analysed in order to review questions which could be answered using LCA, design parameters to be included, and relevant system boundaries according to the objective of the study. 2 Data collection Life cycle inventory data bases (concerning materials and processes) will be updated and complemented with e.g. the hourly variation of the electricity mix in France, emissions of recent wood fuel boilers, impacts related to the fabrication and end of life of PV systems etc. 3 Methodology and modelling A set of environmental indicators can be evaluated, but some aspects like the variation of the electricity mix are not accounted for. This leads to develop a dynamic LCA tool, which is innovative compared to the present methods where all parameters are fixed. This approach can also concern e.g. the variation of a boiler efficiency and thermal properties of insulation. 4 Software development The models developed in earlier phases will be implemented in a package including Pleiades-Comfie (thermal simulation), Equer (LCA of buildings) and Ariadne (LCA of urban settlements). The format of data from Geographic Information Systems will be examined in order to study the feasibility of linking such tools with LCA. 5 Application in case studies The tool will be applied to study : - an urban renovation project in Aubervilliers, North of Paris. The city is studying an environmental plan. Several scenarios will be compared using LCA, and the results will be used to help the municipality improving architectural and urban recommendations within this plan. - a green development project in the South of Paris A high environmental performance is targeted, and it would be interesting to express this performance using LCA indicators. These activities will be performed in link with European networks, e.g. the ENSLIC Building project regarding applications of LCA in the building sector.

The increasing concern over the last years about sustainable development has brought forth the usage of quantitative models in the field of transport and spatial planning. This project proposes to improve our understanding of the interaction between transport and land use models and to increase the readability of their results for decision makers at all levels. From a scientific standpoint, the building of large forecast models that span several disciplines of social sciences and natural sciences is a major challenge for the upcoming years. In particular, disciplines that focus on sustainable development must be able to integrate in a consistent way economic models with physical and environmental ones. The interaction between mobility and land use is an ideal example of such integration. So far, there does not exist any framework that integrates state-of-the-art spatial economic models (of housing market, location choice, etc.) and modern transportation models (i.e. time-dependent segmented travel demand and traffic) under the same umbrella and with the support of the latest technology to analyse and disseminate the results. Several research teams have embarked on that exciting challenge in the world: URBANSIM (USA)(Waddell et al.2003), ILUTE (Canada)(Salvini and Miller 2003), ILUMASS (Germany)(Moeckel et al. 2002) among others. The scientific challenge is to bring together the skills from various disciplines: (a) sophisticated traffic models have been mainly developed by engineers without much concern about the socio-economic reasons why travel demand arises in the first place; (b) economists often treat the transportation sector as a black box and tend to prefer the development of aggregate mathematical models; (c) planners and geographers are concerned about spatial development, have the knowledge of the relevant mechanisms and recognize the need for innovative tools but do not have the training to develop complex numerical forecast models; (d) lastly, computer scientists are nowadays the only actors with the appropriate technical training to design such complex models but obviously they lack the theoretical background for modelling cities and mobility. The project plans to build on accumulated experience at several institutions both academic and from the private sector in the field of operational Land Use and Transport Integrated (LUTI) models. The programme of the project includes the ongoing efforts in Paris and Lyon to have operational applications of the OPUS/URBANSIM framework. It also includes the test of an experimental yet promising approach consisting of the PIRANDELLO model. While maintaining this effort, the project also plans to focus on some particular issues regarding the improvement of a) real estate price models; b) location choice models of commercial activities and c) transportation models by using time-dependent approach (METROPOLIS). An important aspect of PLAINSUDD is to dedicate substantial efforts to the development of MOSART which is a web computer platform to disseminate the results of such models. The idea is that the system is going to be able to show the future aspects of the simulated city in ten or twenty years in a manner that is both intuitive and accessible to the decision makers. For this purpose, LET will team with GEOMOD to develop and implement MOSART using the latest web technologies and industry standards such as VISUM transportation modelling software. The prototype of MOSART is meant to be a proof of concept easily transferable to other cities that could be potentially interested in such prediction tool.