Sustainability assessment of urban systems The history of sustainability assessment goes back more than 20 years with the first scientific articles devoted to the matter appearing in the mid 1990s as laid out in Chapter 1. Starting off with approaches strongly influenced by the older tradition of environmental impact assessments the authors of Chapter 1 show how the sustainability assessment community has slowly but steadily transcended these origins to include more and more social and economic aspects of sustainability over the years thereby considerably broadening the conceptual basis of sustainability assessment practices