**1. Introduction**

Cities are numbers of communities and neighborhoods where people can work live and have entertainment. Day by day cities offer tremendous opportunities for community, employment, education, excitement and interest. For all of these reasons, cities became attractive areas for living and more than half of the world's population are living in cities [1]. On the other hand, cities create problems of congestion, noise, and pollution, but most people do not have the choice, recognizing the trade-offs. How to live and getting the right balance are parts of the solution. Living in towns and low-density cities has some advantages, however people may like living in a compact and dense city as far as there is an equilibrium among the development elements; built area and open spaces, private and public transportation, using natural and artificial resources [2]. City, community or neighborhoods could be considered as a system of depending components [3]. The major variables or components that affect the design of any development are; urban form, transport, landscape, building design, waste management, energy and water supply. The most sustainable design is about equilibrium among these components [4]. In order to make cities or neighborhoods more suitable for people, all aspects of viable city and neighborhoods are required to involve and operate smoothly within design or system equation.

 Shareef, S.; Altan, Sustainability at an Urban Level: A Case Study of a Neighborhood in Dubai, UAE. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*,4355. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su13084355

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**Citation:**

Academic Editor: Abdollah Shafieezadeh

Received: 24 February 2021 Accepted: 8 April 2021 Published: 14 April 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

It is obvious that communities and city growth becomes a key issue in the global problems of climate change, global warming, greenhouse gas emissions, and depleting natural resources. Therefore, many studies and publications have explored the relationship between the sustainability levels required to be achieved and the urban planning of any development. Many of these studies concentrated on the main urban design factors, such as urban form, building design, liveability, land use, and transportation system to analyse, evaluate and develop the sustainability level of cities and developments [5,6]. However, some of these researchers studied sustainability on an urban scale from the aspect of resource conservation and pollution reduction. Cities and urban environment pollution are caused by different factors; density and transport within cities, human activities, construction and buildings' effects on nature and landscape areas, atmospheric pollution by CO2 emissions, and noise pollution [7]. Pollution influences human health and wellbeing and can make cities uneasy places to live. Greenhouse gas (GHG) averages constitute one of the most used air pollution indicators. Greenhouse gas emissions refer to all gases that trap heat in the atmosphere; the main greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are; carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). These gases are the main reason for global warming, depleting the ozone layer, and climate change [8]. GHG are emitted through various fossil fuel burning processes. Fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) are burnt for heating, solid waste burning, trees, and wood products; the decay of organic waste in municipal solid waste landfills, chemical reactions, and manufacturing operations are some resources of GHG [9].

Furthermore, the building and construction industry, transportation, agriculture, and industry are the major recourses of these gases. Global warming, urban heat island (UHI), and the increase in global air temperature are a result of GHG emission. Buildings design, transportation systems, and open areas significantly affect the sustainability of the urban level. Buildings contribute to the CO2 emissions by 43%, while the transportation share is 32% [10]. Therefore, cities should be designed in a way that minimizes the GHG averages and pollution percentages. The new cities should be designed to keep their inhabitants healthy, secure, and happy. For this aim, a neighborhood must become greener and robust, with a stable ecosystem. Our built environment at the present time suffers enough and an integrated approach is urgently needed. Successful solutions depend on understanding the relationship among the involved sustainability elements; environmental, historical, social, and economic. The solutions should start from the individual building to the block, neighborhood, district, city, region, and up towards the globe. Furthermore, adopting active urban design strategies, such as using renewable energy (PV) solar panels at the urban level, will enhance the sustainability on an urban and city scale [11].

The terms "Neighborhood" or "Community" refer to a number of residential units and the related facilities that serve the resident's needs [12]. Livable, sustainable neighborhoods are one of the determining and essential factors for developing sustainable environments [13]. The sustainable neighborhood is a neighborhood that integrates the three sustainability pillars "Environment, Economy and Society". From the social aspect, providing the required open areas, landscaped areas, playgrounds, and community facilities will encourage sociality and people communications [14]. From the economic aspect, those sustainable neighborhoods that provide all the services and facilities will create livable, healthy independent communities that will have a positive effect on the individuals and the whole society [15]. However, "The Sustainable Urban Design" provides a high level of sustainability and efficiency in terms of major urban design dimensions, such as livability, land use, transportation, buildings design, landscaped areas, and environmental performance [16,17]. However, "The Sustainable Urban Design" provides a high level of sustainability and efficiency in terms of major urban design dimensions, such as liveability, land use, transportations, buildings design, landscaped areas, and environmental performance.

Urban sustainability is significant to the future of humans; it directly affects people's lifestyle, time, effort, health, wellbeing and welfare [18]. Transportation, resources conservation, indoor, and outdoor thermal comfort represent some of the sustainable urban

design factors that have a direct effect on the livable community. The major challenge for the urban designer is to improve and optimize the relation among the three factors in urban geometry; density, movement and recourses. Sustainability at the urban level could be achieved through optimizing the three aspects of, and finding the best design for, the neighborhood, district and city [19]. The urban areas and communities include buildings, open and green spaces, water features and road networks. These are the urban design elements that should be organized in a way that provides vitality and improves the people's lifestyle [20].

Creating a liveable environment is one of the sustainable urban design principles, and the level of urban liveability could be considered important in achieving sustainability in the urban environment. Urban sustainability can be obtained by creating a liveable community, neighbourhood, and city [20]. Urban liveability covers a number of factors; it is a multi-dimensional construct that includes accessibility, number of public parks and open spaces, walkability, transportation planning, urban density, and land use diversity, all of which are design elements that could be improved to achieve high levels of liveability and sustainability [21]. However, it is difficult to define and measure the concept of urban liveability, and set some principles for liveability measurements, such as safety, equity, and continuity [12]. Moreover, when it comes to accessibility and inclusiveness of the previously mentioned indicators [22], accessibility, land use diversity, providing parks and green areas are of the strategies used when planning a sustainable neighborhood. Passive design also has an effective role in achieving a green and sustainable community by offering recourses efficiency [23,24]. The crucial roles of the green space on ecosystem have already been proven by some researchers [25]. The leakage in accessibility to these areas and other community services affects the community sustainability level; ensuring a good accessibility will improve the community sustainability, and this consequently improves the community social life [25]. The service within the green areas, including sport services, has an impressive impact on peoples' wellbeing, and is resulting with good social relations among the residences [25]. It has been proven that the design and the architecture of the buildings should collaborate with surrounding nature to create a harmony between the outdoor and indoor spaces. The concept of human community should be designed to positively influence the human behavior, health and culture [26]. Other than that, land use diversity is another factor that forms a sustainable community. Land use diversity and ensuring a good accessibility to the daily required services would improve peoples' lifestyle from one side, and have a positive effect on resource saving from the other side [27]. The reduction in the use of transportation and vehicle's journey will consequently have a positive impact environmentally, by reducing CO2 emissions [28,29].

Passive design is one of the strategies that the urban planner can adopt for designing a sustainable community according to its direct effect on outdoor and indoor thermal performance [30]. The urban air temperature is rising in all cities around the world, as a result of global warming and the decrease in the natural and greenery area in cities. This rise in outdoor air temperature consequently affects the thermal performance of the inner space environment and increases the indoor air temperature averages [30]. The impact of buildings and urban geometry on the urban heat island phenomena and the outdoor thermal performance has been proven in many studies [31]. Increasing and enhancing the sustainability of our developments is an urgen<sup>t</sup> matter when it comes to facing global warning, resources limitation, and pollution. Implementing the passive and active design elements on buildings and at the urban level represents a part of the solution [32].

Building design, orientation, and block density are of significant effects in development sustainability [33,34]. Creating a desired shading on urban level will have a positive thermal impact on both outdoor and indoor environments. In the hot climate conditions of the UAE, the reduction in air temperature and solar gain due to the orientation can reach 1.8 ◦C and 13% respectively. [34]. One of the rule of thumb in urban design is the belief that energy consumption decreases when the community or city density increases. This is a challenge to the urban designer to find the best balance between the two variables in

urban planning; density and energy [35]. Furthermore, optimizing the indoor and thermal performance on an urban level will have a positive impact on livability, productivity, and indoor energy consumption [36].

The strong urban structure provides less use or need for transportation and reduces the path, the cycling transportation in the most preferred plan, and different types of transportation plays a significant role in changing the traditional urban structure. The vehicle flow, parking areas, street width, public transportation stations, and many others related to the transit system are the elements that should be well designed to obtain a strong structure [37,38]. Consequently, road planning affects the other urban factors such as gardens and open areas, and playgrounds, which should be counted on during early design stages. The sustainable land use planning is the significant factor in reducing the daily transporting cycle, and increasing walkability as one of the sustainable neighborhood requirements [39]. Furthermore, greenery and landscaped areas could be effective influences on increasing walkability from one side, reducing air temperatures and enhancing outdoor and indoor thermal performances from the other side [40].

The impact of communities and developments has been illustrated previously. The former studies proved the significant impact of sustainable urban design and sustainable developments on reducing the negative environmental effect caused by continuous urbanization. This study aims to contribute to this concept by investigating the potential of improving the performance of one of the Dubai community's performances towards sustainable performance. Hence, a community located in the city of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) will be explored, evaluated, and optimized to achieve a sustainable community that follows the sustainable design standards. Dubai is located in the north of the UAE, and extended along the Arabian Gulf with a climate that is known with its humidity during summers, due to its location of the city on Dubai Creek. Generally, the weather in Dubai is sunny most days of the year; in winter, the average temperature is 25 ◦C, while in summer, the temperature may reach up to 38 ◦C, with a high percentage of humidity between 20–60%, and a low average of rainy days. The annual air temperature varied between 17 ◦C in winter and 35 ◦C by a Dubai weather file generated through the Integrated Environmental Solutions—Virtual Environment (IES-VE) software [41].
