The inclusion of gender views in every field and, especially, in urbanism, has become crucial for urban planning. Considering both men’s and women’s interests in an integrated gender equality perspective provides better results that improve the quality of public spaces and engenders a more sustainable society. However, to realize such benefits, efforts are required not only to understand the needs and preferences of urban residents but also to shape policies and develop strategies to mitigate vulnerability with population involvement. In order to help decision makers at the urban level evaluate vulnerability with the inclusion of gender views, this study proposes a model that incorporates the specificities of urban fabric users that face adverse conditions. The model is based on a structured and standardized checklist of key topics that could be applied to any urban development. From this checklist, a list of categories, subcategories, and indicators were proposed and validated using the inter-judge agreement technique. To illustrate this model, this paper presents the case study of Castellón (Spain) in which deprived neighborhoods were analyzed, updating a previous model intended only to detect vulnerability. The results help link policy making to social vulnerability and indicate strategies to reach inclusive neighborhoods via a gender equality approach.

There is an important mismatch, or gap, between the predicted and actual measurements of the impacts that are produced, mainly during the use phase of buildings. In this study, the authors estimated the weight of the different explanatory variables used to define the model for predicting the impacts in the evaluation of the dependent variables considered: ‘CO₂ equivalent emissions’ and ‘primary energy consumption’. The study explores the extent to which the intervention of high- or low-energy users (depending on their purchasing power) influences the impacts of the use phase linked to the envelope, ‘user interaction’ being considered as a variable that modifies the impact predicted by the model. The results obtained show that, without taking the user into account, climate zone is the variable with the greatest influence, since it accounts for over 80% of the variation in heating consumption in the use phase. However, on analysing the influence of the user in zones with a continental climate, the results varied with respect to the predicted value, from 5% in the case of low-energy users up to more than 53% when they are very high-energy users.

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En el sector de la construcción se han desarrollado numerosos sistemas de calificación de sostenibilidad. En este documento distinguimos entre aquellos que pretenden que las empresas que luchan por mejorar su sostenibilidad obtengan una base objetiva para comunicar sus esfuerzos, como LEED, y aquellos que evalúan el impacto medioambiental de los productos durante el ciclo de vida, como ATHENA Impact Estimador. Denominamos a los primeros, sistemas de evaluación basada en el esfuerzo y a los segundos, sistemas de evaluación basada en datos. Este trabajo revisa el estado del arte de estos sistemas y evalúa su efectividad comparando los indicadores utilizados con los estándares establecidos por el the Technical Committee (TC) 350 of the European Committee for standardization (CEN). Observamos que un 62% de los indicadores sociales y económicos propuestos por el CEN/TC 350 no son considerados por los sistemas de evaluación basados en datos mientras que los sistemas de evaluación basados en el esfuerzo tienen en cuenta aproximadamente la mitad de estos indicadores.