The SPARTACUS System for Defining and Analysing Sustainable Urban Land Use and Transport Policies

Abstract

SPARTACUS, the System for Planning and Research in Towns and Cities for Urban Sustainability, is a strategic urban planning support system based on a state-of-the-art land use and transport model called MEPLAN. It is combined with a set of urban sustainability indicators, a GIS-based Raster method to calculate values for some of the indicators, a database and presentation module as well as a decision support tool called USE-IT The latter module is used for evaluating the results of policy options based on weighted indicator values representing social, environmental and economic effects of urban policies.

The SPARTACUS system has been usedfor assessing optionsfor urban sustainability policies in a systematic way in three cities, Helsinki, Bilbao and Naples. The test results show that the level of sustainability can be increased in the test cities in a cost-effective way by using a variety ofpolicies, especially pricing and regulatory policies and their combinations. The negative side effects of individual policies can be mitigated through combining policies in an innovative way. Recommendations based on the above studies have been given for sustainable urban policies and future research.