Sustainable communities are an ideal that is being strived for by many sectors of the community-building and planning profession. To minimize energy use as part of a holistic view of the community building process is its end goal. The McMaster University Sustainable Community Research Group is furthering this goal through innovative research on both the design and evaluation fronts of this new movement.

This site contains summaries and end-results of several facets of this research, with the hopes that it will prove useful to both planning and design professionals, as well as the interested population at large. A large focus of the research has been in the construction of Decision Support Systems for community design, and they can be found under the Design link. The corollary to Design, the Evaluation link contains three software prototypes for the evaluation of proposed communities, in terms of sustainability.

Virtual communities is the newest branch of this research, and allows you to create, with the help of a decision support system, a virtual, 3 dimensional community, which you can then navigate as though you were actually there. It is hoped that this will become a powerful design aid in the near future.

The McMaster University Sustainable Community Research Group is led by Dr. Brian W. Baetz.