2008 Volume 4 Issue 1 Pages 44-50
Objective. This paper aims 1) to grasp the mechanism for impacts of ‛location of buildings' on environmental load, 2) to review existing researches, and 3) to examine the environmental load by applying LCA in the scale of urban areas in a case city.
Results and Discussion. There are two types of approaches for estimating the environmental load with buildings. The one is a micro level approach to target each building or town block, and the either is a macro level approach to target the urban area or region. The former approach can estimate the environmental load induced by each building or town block e. g. relating transport activity. The latter sets the boundary for estimating it from the various types of activities which can be changed according to the location of buildings. The literature review shows that the environmental load from transport sector has been studied in transport engineering field, and that from domestic sector has been studied in architectural field separately. However, it is very important to estimate the emission from transport sector in examining location of buildings with the view of environmental load. Our case study applying LCA in an actual city indicates that there might be a correlation between the geographical distribution of CO2 emission and that of population, and that the CO2 emission per capita is larger in dense district than that in suburban area. These results imply that the compact city policy has the potential to reduce the Life Cycle CO2 emission of buildings.
Conclusions. This paper concludes the necessity of the framework for evaluating the impacts of both ‛the locational distribution of buildings in urban areas' and ‛the types of buildings' on the environmental load throughout the change in life- and work-style. LCA approach is effective for the analysis. Further, the collaboration between the researches in the transport sector and domestic sector is needed.
