Sustainable or status-quo: investigating sustainability assessment of residential estate development

?Urban fringe residential estates continue to dominate the residential development sector in Australia. Several practice based sustainability assessment tools have recently been developed which acknowledge the impacts of such developments and attempt to improve outcomes. This paper examines how sustainability principles and concepts are presented and applied in such assessment tools, focusing on two Australian based examples, the Sustainable Community Rating Tool and EnviroDevelopment. The paper argues that the increasing use of sustainability rhetoric in the assessment of residential estate development is often tenuously connected to sustainability principles, and that more rigour is required in the adoption and application of sustainability principles in such assessment.