Critical Appraisal of an Example of Best Practice in Urban Sustainability

Urban centers are key to achieving the global goals of sustainability. Urban sustainability entails having thriving cities that fulfill their needs without impacting the long-term sustainability of the ecosystem. Achieving urban sustainability is, therefore, an important goal as sustainable urban centers portend numerous benefits to the ecosystem. This paper critically appraises Singapore as a best practice in Urban Sustainability. It reviews the literature on urban sustainability and discusses the high and low-performing sectors in Singapore. It finds a gap in contemporary urban sustainability metrics whereby most of the globally acclaimed Urban Sustainability Indicators do not measure universal design for inclusivity as an aspect of urban sustainability. This study, therefore, includes it as a measure and appraises it. High-performing areas highlighted in this study comprise education; universal design for inclusivity; transportation; people-centered approach; water and energy management; healthcare, safety and security; and food security. Areas for improvement comprise self-sufficiency in food production, urban heat island effect, and public participation and social welfare. The aim is to serve as a lesson to cities worldwide as they work towards achieving urban sustainability and provide key information to policymakers as they seek to improve the sustainability of their urban environment.

Conceptual frameworks for urban sustainability indicators - an empirical analysis

Indicator-based assessment represents a popular means of operationalizing the concept of sustainability. A central yet often neglected aspect in the development of indicator sets concerns the elaboration of accompanying conceptual frameworks. Despite the pivotal role that such frameworks play, and the normative power they wield, little explicit guidance exists for their development. To address this issue, we analyze an extensive sample of conceptual frameworks drawn from 67 urban indicator initiatives. The results of the analysis elaborate an empirically-based typology of four principal and two emerging framework types, each based on a particular logic for creating conceptual categories for urban sustainability indicators. We also develop a comparison of the framework types in terms of their respective abilities to meet the different purposes that conceptual frameworks ideally serve in indicator set development. The results allow us to provide much-needed guidance for indicator set developers; first, by laying out the range of options available; second, by helping developers choose between types of frameworks in accordance with their particular aims. In addition, through analysis of how urban sustainability is de facto defined in indicator initiatives, we aim to make a conceptual contribution that advances our understanding of the meaning of this complex concept.

ANALYSIS OF SCIENTIFIC AND METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO THE ASSESSMENT OF THE URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE SUSTAINABILITY

Urban infrastructure sustainability assessment currently is being viewed as an important step towards the reduction of urbanization consequences, at the same time improving sustainability of communities within economic, social and ecological changes. To make such informed decisions, scientists have already developed several tools for comprehensive assessment of cities’ sustainability, which unfortunately do not fully reflect the sustainability of their infrastructures. Most modern assessment methods have been developed based on the needs of developed countries, which differ from the needs of developing countries. Increasingly, cities in developed countries obtain the top positions in various international rankings for urban sustainability. At the same time, cities in developing countries are rarely included in the rankings. Despite the presence of a significant number of scientific papers on the topic of urban sustainability assessment, the methodology for assessing the sustainability of its infrastructure remains unestablished. Most scholars consider urban infrastructure to be an integral part of sustainability assessment. According to the author, this approach is ineffective in terms of the results obtained, as it does not provide an opportunity to objectively analyze the state of municipal infrastructure due to the small number of criteria used for direct evaluation. This approach also limits the possibility of comparison between the infrastructures of different cities. Therefore, there is a need for further research and development of a specialized methodology for urban infrastructure sustainability assessment. Within the scope of this work, author analyzed various methods used for urban infrastructure sustainability assessment, presenting their advantages and disadvantages as well as analyzed the wholeness of the main urban sustainability indicators used for urban infrastructure assessment. It was revealed that out of 9 indicators analyzed only 3 proved to be adequate based on the number of infrastructure components included into assessment methodologies and availability of assessment results for several consequent years.

Sustainable and inclusive – Evaluating urban sustainability indicators’ suitability for measuring progress towards SDG-11

The adoption of the sustainable development goals marks a transition in the global sustainability discourse to a growing focus on equity, with urban areas’ role in achieving sustainable and inclusive growth more explicit in sustainable development goal-11. Within this discourse, urban sustainability indicators could be used to monitor environmental quality and equity within individual cities, while promising to deepen our understanding of how urban areas contribute to global environmental sustainability. We examine 484 indicators of urban and regional environmental sustainability sourced from 40 indexes and online data repositories to determine their suitability for measuring both urban environmental performance and equity. Despite the large number of existing indicators related to urban environmental monitoring, we find that they are inadequate as tools for evaluating progress towards sustainable development goal-11’s integrated goal of sustainable and inclusive (i.e. equitable) urban areas, due to a lack of benchmarks, targets, and explicit measurement of equity considerations. Future research should emphasize data collection that can be disaggregated geographically to make it possible to measure distributional equity and establish locally appropriate benchmarks and realistic targets for urban sustainability indicators. Lastly, we argue that utilizing large-scale, high-resolution datasets has the potential to help overcome these data collection challenges.

Enhancing Urban Sustainable Indicators in a German City—Towards Human-Centered Measurements for Sustainable Urban Planning

This contribution demonstrates how more human-centered measurements for sustainable urban planning can be created by enlarging the traditional set of urban sustainability indicators. In many municipal reports, sustainable indicators concentrate on environmental issues, by collecting data at an aggregated spatial and temporal level using quantitative methods. Our approach aims to expand and improve the currently dominant quantitative–statistical methods by including perception geographical data (subjective indicators following the social indicator approach), namely additional indicators at spatial and temporal levels. Including small-scale city district levels and a temporal differentiation produces more process assessments and a better representation of everyday life. Based on a survey we conducted at district levels in the city of Karlsruhe, we cover three sustainability dimensions (ecological, social, economic) and analyze (1) how citizens are mobile in a sustainable way (bike use) and (2) how they perceive and react to heat events in the city. We argue for taking people’s perception and the spatiality and temporality of their daily activities better into account when further developing urban sustainability indicators and when aiming for a sustainable, human-centered urban development.

A Framework for Measuring Urban Sustainability in an Emerging Region: The City of Duhok as a Case Study

The City of Duhok in Iraq, as one of the Kurdistan Region’s (KR) main cities, is concerned about sustainability but lacks the measures to guide urban policies. This study bridges this gap and offers an example of the use of urban sustainability indicators in an emerging region that experiences rapid urbanization and growth. The substantial objective of this study was to develop a functional framework of indicators to assess and measure urban sustainability for the city after KR’s declaration of autonomy in 1991 until 2010. That is, we limited our investigation to examining previous research, which decisively contains the approach to “measuring urban sustainability”. The study followed a three-step approach to examine urban sustainability as an integration of a few other relevant studies. The study concluded with two facts: First, the lack of progress on urban sustainability in the first decades resulted from the destabilized era that left the city administratively fragmented. Second, the political and economic watershed led to steady progress towards urban sustainability post-2005. The study highlights nine urban sustainability indicators, from a total of 39 indicators, that played an important role in navigating the general trend of urban sustainability in the city and how they can be used to promote future sustainable practices.