This review examines the European Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities, an online framework for use by urban practitioners to evaluate and visualize the sustainability profile and priorities of an urban sustainability plan, policy, or initiative. This review presents recognized benefits and challenges from a testing phase of the framework, how it fits into the European Urban Agenda, and more broadly how indicator frameworks connect to the global urban sustainability context. Keywords Urban sustainability. sustainability indicators. EU Urban Agenda. sustainable development The European Reference Framework for Sustainable Cities (RFSC, see CEREMA 2016) is an online framework for use by urban practitioners to evaluate and visualize the sustainability profile and priorities of an urban sustainability plan, policy, or initiative. To develop this framework, a working group of EU representatives and the Council of European Municipalities and Regions selected 30 actions based on (1) their relevance to the EU Urban Agenda and (2) the accessibility and availability of relevant data needed to assess the indicators. The EU Urban Agenda (European Commission n.d.) emerged from the 2007 Leipzig Charter (European Commission 2007), where common urban development principles were agreed upon, and the 2008 Marseille Declaration, where a tool to implement those principles (the RFSC) was agreed upon. The EU Urban Agenda seeks to streamline existing EU regulations with urban concerns to address socioeconomic inequalities and improve community wellbeing. The RFSC is managed by the French government's Centre of Expertise on Risk, Environment, Mobility and Planning (CEREMA) and the framework's 30 actions are broken into five dimensions: spatial, governance, social, economic, and environmental
Sustainable lifestyles research to date reveals a need for empirical insight to how it is defined in practice within the context of societal change. This article attends to this gap by demonstrating how sustainable lifestyles are understood in one of the world's "greenest" cities: Copenhagen (DK). On the basis of ethnographic field research with local policy-makers and sustainability-oriented community groups, I found that a dominant theme reflects Copenhagen's green city policy goals, as it envisions a techno-moral, energy-efficient citizen. Three contradictions were evident in this imaginary: privilege (class), suburbanites (scale), and disincentivizing (measurement).I give examples of how this green city citizen imaginary is inserted in policy, which demonstrates a disjuncture between how sustainable lifestyles are understood in practice and theory. This study empirically contributes to the ambiguous concept of sustainable lifestyles, while shedding light on potential social tensions of technocentric green city policy.
This paper explores the perception and politics of air pollution in Shanghai. We present a qualitative case study based on a literature review of relevant policies and research on civil society and air pollution, in dialogue with air quality indexes and field research data. We engage with the concept of China's authoritarian environmentalism and the political context of ecological civilization. We find that discussions about air pollution are often placed in a frame that is both locally temporal (environment) and internationally developmentalist (economy). We raise questions from an example of three applications with different presentations of air quality index measures for the same time and place. This example and frame highlight the central role and connection between technology, data and evidence, and pollution visibility in the case of the perception of air pollution. Our findings then point to two gaps in authoritarian environmentalism research, revealing a need to better understand (1) the role of technology within this governance context, and (2) the tensions created from this non-participatory approach with ecological civilization, which calls for civil society participation.
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