Sustainable urban develpment - Thesis Example

The invisible impacts are more deep rooted, though they are difficult to see and assess. These invisible impacts include changes in the quality of life, changing social structures and genetic changes. There are also several possible impacts of urban development, namely, increase in employment opportunities, cost-effective and efficient supply of basic amenities like water, electricity, gas etc., availability of medical and educational facilities, and promotion of safe and environmental friendly public transport system.

The implementation sites are therefore required to be sustainable or assessed so as to evaluate the associated costs and benefits to the region and to the life of the people. For this, various environmental impact assessment is carried out. There are several methods for carrying out the environmental impact assessment like the checklist method, the matrix method, the network method, the overlay method and the battelle method. While all the methods have their applicability, Battelle method is found to be more holistic as it takes into account a large number of parameters related to the physical environment and human habitats and also assigns weights based on relative importance of the factors at the given site.

The current study uses the Battelle method to evaluate a large implementation site at Hayeel. This implementation site, which is a mixed-use project, covers an area of 3,000,000 meter squares. The results of the Environmental Impact analysis show a negative EIU (Environmental Impact Unit) of -503.9 which means the development will affect the sustainability of the site. The research concludes with making several recommendations that can help in mitigating the detrimental impacts of the implementation site.

(I suggest you add some more specific recommendations based on your actual