Urboecology Problems in Building the Quality Index of the Urban Environment and its Use for Assessing the Sustainable Development of Cities

Abstract

The analysis of domestic and foreign sources on the methodology of construction and use of integral indices of quality of the urban environment and sustainable urban development was carried out. It is shown that these indices can be represented as urban-ecological in a broad sense. A method developed by the authors for the formation of a dynamic quality index of the urban environment, which allows the dynamics of the index and its components to evaluate both the quality of the urban environment and the direction of its change, is presented. Using the example of Kirov, the environmental characteristics of the urban environment, taken into account when calculating the index, and the problems of their measurement and presentation are described in detail. The prospects of the developed methodology for solving problems of urban ecological development are shown.

Economic Aspects Analysis in Calculation and Application of the Urban Environment Quality Index

“…This analysis enables us to suggest that the existing method, used in [19,20], of calculating the municipality UEQI should be improved. We suggest that special economic indicator subgroup in each of the groups should be discarded; or that economic characteristics should be introduced into sufficiency indicator groups, or that an additional group within the UEQI should be created, and named "The Economy of the Urban Environment," for instance, as it is the fact in many cases [10][11][12][13].…”

“…The method of calculating the UEQI in question also corresponds to this approach and is described in some detail in [19], where the UEQI values are given when this method was tested for the city of Kirov, Russia. It should be noted that in the UEQI composition we isolated 4 groups of indicators, namely: the first -"Safety and ecology of the urban environment", the second -"Architectural and landscape part of the urban environment and housing", the third -"Social environment and public leisure infrastructure environment", and the fourth -"Engineering and transport infrastructure of the urban environment" [19,20]. Each group includes same three subgroups: sufficiency indicators ("indicators of provision" according to the terminology used in [19]), economic indicators and sociological evaluation indicators, however, the retrospective data are available only on the indicators of the first two subgroups.…”

“…All sufficiency indicators and economic indicators were calculated primarily on the basis of official statistics, as for the economic indicators, the data were taken mainly from the accounts on the city budget expenditures for each year of the period. An important principle in UEQI calculation is the balance of groups and subgroups in the number and value of indicators, which implies a priori equilibrium of indicators' indices in subgroups, subgroups' indices in groups, and group indices when calculating the UEQI, which leads to an easy-to-do calculation of composite indices as arithmetic averages as implemented in [19,20], and in many international methods [10,[12][13].…”