Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
the neighbourhood, the community or, in general, the places where people interact
and live. Universities are no exception to this guideline: in different countries,
universities are nowadays implementing dedicated strategies on sustainability, for
instance, by introducing educational courses or a sustainability orientation in different
disciplines (Shriberg
2002
; Mcmillin and Dyball
2009
), implementing processes to
evaluate the sustainability of their performance (Beringer
2006
; Alshuwaikhat and
Abubakar
2008
), developing plans for sustainable action and attaching a strong
importance of the issues regarding sustainability in the processes of planning space,
energy or buildings (Franklin et al.
2003
; Darus et al.
2009
). At an international level,
various attempts to create a standard for evaluation and strategic assessment on the
sustainable development of university campuses are being developed, like the
Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (AASHE
2012
).
University campuses are ideal spaces where thousands of persons interact every
day, performing different tasks with diverse purposes and motivations: students,
researchers, teachers, managers, other professional staff and visitors use a common
space for their daily activities, requiring a wide range of products and services,
consuming energy, walking and relaxing in public spaces, and using common
facilities. Considering the importance recently given to sustainability issues in
local planning processes, the need for strategic assessment, and the implementation
of academic programs in many universities, these communities are especially
appropriate to be analysed as a “living lab” for the evaluation of actions and policies
regarding sustainable behaviour, at individual and collective levels. This work will
focus on the environmental and social dimensions of the sustainability of a concrete
University Campus, analysing the perceptions of its users on the long-term
implications of the physical planning of the Campus for its ecological preservation
and the promotion of social interaction and cohesion.
The case study to be analysed is the campus of Hokkaido University in Sapporo,
Japan. Hokkaido is a beautiful natural island and the city of Sapporo is surrounded
by majestuous mountains. This situation calls for a careful planning of this univer-
sity campus, which assumes a central place in the city and offers an oasis of quiet.
The aim of this work is to develop and support a new orientation in campus planning,
based on a stakeholder-oriented—and thus a bottom-up—approach. A preference
elicitation will be organized through focus groups, while next the systematically
collected information is organized through two complementary tools: multi-criteria
analysis (MCA) and strategic choice analysis (SCA). This is a novel approach in the
Japanese context, where stakeholder-based land use planning is rather uncommon.
20.2
Research Methodology on Sustainable Campus
Development
20.2.1 General Orientation
A client-oriented approach to sustainable campus (re)development involving the
users of the campus of Hokkaido University will be developed in the present study
in order to identify the main success and failure factors, in particular how the
