Role of Buildings Life Cycle Assessment for Shaping Sustainable Cities

Beside positive desired direct effects of industrial activities having the goal to increase humanity quality of life by developing, applying and using diverse technologies, these can also have negative, undesired impacts on environment and society. In this regard the concept of sustainable development has been recognized and accepted as being the possible solution for the arisen complex global environmental, economic and social problems, which humanity is actually confronted with. To assure the transition of our society toward sustainability technical, economic, environmental as well as socio-political aspects have to be simultaneously considered as much as possible in decision making processes. For engineers this means to lead technology assessment studies and to comprehensively assess industrial applications as well as correlated necessary infrastructure, especially existing and planned buildings. From this reason it is very important to develop analytical tools to analyze and assess buildings from the point of view of their potential impacts with regard to shaping sustainable cities. One of these tools already applied in technological field is the Life Cycle Assessment. In this paper the applying possibility of Life Cycle Assessment in the context of diverse buildings will be presented and debated in order to assure shaping sustainable cities.