Experimental Integration of GIS-Based Tools and Environmental Performance Evaluation Systems in Building Coastal Tourist Settlement Impact Scenarios

Iginia Plantamura, Maria Raffaella Lamacchia, Silvana Milella

ICAR Department, Polytechnic of Bari (IT)

A case study along the Apulian peninsula
Together with a general phenomenon of urbanization rate increase of coastal zones all over the world, due to the well-documented increasing demographic pressure, along most coasts, particularly Mediterranean coasts, there is a relevant increase in the building pressure caused by tourist activities.
This phenomenon is all the more worrying as it threatens coastal areas of significant aesthetic and environmental value and/or coastal areas saved by residential building expansion until now, and this because of a considerable instability and fragility of the eco-system, as in the case of wetlands, sandy dunes, etc.
The experimental integration of geographical information systems and environmental performance evaluation systems, for the creation of impact scenarios of coastal tourist buildings presented in this work, is set within a research financed by Italian National Research Centre (CNR - Agenzia 2000 - Progetto Giovani) entitled "Spatial Decision Support Systems for Integrated Tourism Management in Mediterranean Coastal Zone" aimed a the creation of a georeferenced pilot coastal database for integrated coastal tourism management along Apulian peninsula, in south-eastern Italy.
The experiment aims at the creation of scenarios meant as mode of reasoning on the future.
A qualitative-explicative mode, not belonging neither to the class of prediction, or "prophecies", nor to that of scientific foresight.
The goal of the work is starting a reflection on the different environmental impacts implied by different typologies of coastal tourism settlements (i.e.: continuous/concentrated vs discontinuous/dispersed; spontaneous/illegal vs planned/legal, etc) through the construction of extreme scenarios, rather than creating trend scenarios and/or predictions of the statistic probability rate of the possible future physical transformation associated with the coastal tourist phenomenon on the basis of quantity information deriving from the state of the places.
After proving the existence of a meaningful relationship between tourist pressure increase and building density increase along the coasts of the whole apulian peninsula in the last decade, through the analysis on GIS base of statistic data about the tourist phenomenon trend and georeferenced database of land cover change (Corine Land Cover 1990-1999), disaggregated at commune level, the experiment focus on a study area (subtended by a 45 Km chord) located between the coastal cities of Monopoli and Brindis characterised by (i) an essentially plain and sandy shore, (ii) the absence of relevant residential settlements; (iii) and the spreading of tourism settlements both planned/legal and unplanned/illegal with different degree of density.
Within this area, analysing the data stored in the Apulian Pilot Coastal Database 3 zones have been pointed out: (i) firstly a zone concerning tourist hotel settlements; (ii) secondly a zone concerning planned tourist buildings (areas destined for tourist expansion by land use master plans, whose building density does not exceed much the predictions); (iii) finally, a zone concerning non-planned tourist buildings (areas destined by land use master plans to agricultural uses, whose current density considerably exceeds the covering rate index of 0.3 maximum allowed in those areas).
Through the use of an environmental performance evaluation system, environmental performances of three hypothetical buildings have been evaluated. The three buildings represented the three areas. The evaluation has been carried out implementing in the system the average data of the tourist buildings located in the three areas in analysis, average data partly evaluated through field analysis and partly extrapolated from the Apulian Pilot Coastal Database by means of GIS Spatial Analysis tools.
The international scene offers rich scientific literature regarding these systems supported by research and experiments from the technical as well as the regulation point of view, but the results are often difficult to adapt to the Italian situation. Therefore these results have to be re-adapted and ways of transferring them to the Italian scene have to be worked out, also by collecting data from field research.
The knowledge state of the art on these subjects and the so far developed studying methods and software have allowed us to choose among different kinds of approaches to analyse the building environmental compatibility; the choice has finally fallen on those approaches facing this evaluation from a Life Cycle approach perspective for three different reasons: (i) the fact that the Life Cycle Assessment method has recently been standardised by a series of international norms (ISO 14040) and used by the European Community as an evaluation tool for issuing environmental labels and certificates on products and processes; (ii) the kind of output of such method that allows us to obtain quantitative evaluations through a transparent and verifiable process, which is different from methods that propose a qualitative output often based on subjective evaluations; (iii) the competence accumulated over the past few years in applying the LCA method, by some scholars involved in the research.
By means of such an environmental performance evaluation system (method and software) the environmental performance of the three hypothetical buildings were quantified through two phases: a building characterization phase and an environmental performance evaluation phase. In the first phase the buildings were characterized according to three parameters: (i) the building size in volume, the percentage of windows on vertical surfaces, the orientation regarding environmental factors in context; (ii) the materials and building components used; (iii) the electricity supplying system. In the second phase a series of indicators characterizing different aspects of the environmental problem were calculated assigning unitary points (eco-points);
Finally, starting from the obtained evaluation, the creation of a knowledge map has been experimented as to the current environmental impact level of tourist buildings in the analysed area and some extreme futurable scenarios, built according to the hypothesis of a linear increase of the tourist building pressure each time substantiated exclusively through one of the three settlement models taken into consideration.
Such knowledge maps and extreme futurable scenarios are efficacious tools as for the policy programming choice towards a sustainable tourism development. They allow a direct comparison among alternative project choices, that is to say the possibility of rapidly evaluating the effect on the environment of choosing different materials, systems etc. Therefore, the integrated use of Geographical Information Systems on the Mediterranean coastal environment and Environmental Performance Evaluation Systems of the hotel-reception buildings here located becomes strategic in order to orient the planning and design choices according to a perspective of environment sustainability of the realization.