Sustainable Urban Liveability: A Practical Proposal Based on a Composite Indicator

Abstract

This article presents a proposal for a composite index to assess the degree of sustainable urban liveability. It makes two key contributions to this field of study. The first is a proposal for the concept of sustainable urban liveability that includes the need to meet a minimum number of environmental conditions in terms of resource consumption and the deterioration of the environment. The second contribution is the use of a non-compensatory aggregation technique in order to construct the composite index. This kind of aggregation technique does not allow trade-offs between partial indicators. In the particular context of sustainable urban liveability, it prevents poor performance by the natural environment indicators from being compensated by positive results in the remaining indicators. The proposed composite index for sustainable urban liveability is applied to the case of 58 Spanish cities. The results reveal significant differences in the degree of sustainable urban liveability for this group of cities, but more importantly, they highlight the potential of this proposal for urban management.

Urban Sustainability Performance Measurement of a Small Brazilian City

“…However, it is clear that the authors have different views about the metrics and factors to be evaluated. The most prominent criterion in the literature refers to the production of waste [7,9,10], although other factors are also highlighted, such as waste collection and treatment methods [33], waste sent to landfill [7,22], and urban cleaning [15]. The existence of similarities between the evaluation criteria present in the model and in the literature was noticed, although the measurement of waste production was not considered by the actors.…”

“…The complexity of cities and their socioeconomic and environmental phenomena represent a challenge for both science and politics [6,16]. Adopting a sustainable development policy clearly identifies to public managers: The changes needed to reach the goal; What should be measured; How to measure; Which criteria can be used for this assessment [10]. To assist in this process, they can make use of a PM model.…”

“…A recurrent problem in the construction of a PM model is the lack of available data, which results in the exclusion of relevant criteria from the analyses [10,22,29]. This is a barrier often encountered, even in the analysis of urban sustainability based on the SDGs.…”

“…There are limiting factors in the process that need to be considered, which are: Technical capacity (knowledge, experience and training), low political commitment, financial resources [8], and citizens' knowledge [3]. In addition, the adoption of beneficial actions for only one dimension or, that which promotes sectoral interests at the expense of others, should be avoided [9], as sacrificing the performance of one dimension to achieve better performance in another contradicts the nature of sustainable development [2,10]. Sustainable urban development, therefore, presupposes a favorable performance for all three dimensions.…”

Conceptual frameworks for urban sustainability indicators - an empirical analysis

“…A model where all categories are portrayed as connected with all other categories in a symmetric manner) to have fallen outside of the definition as insufficiently specifying the relationships between the categories. Xu et al, 2016;Valcárcel-Aguiar et al, 2019) differentiate indicator categories in terms of the functional roles that they play vis-à-vis each other within the system (Fig. 7a).…”