Urban Sustainability Indicators ─ A Guidebook

The issues of urban sustainability are critical, and more so for cities with already high density where the problems of resource constraints, quality of urban community life, and quality of the physical environment are exacerbated by the sheer intensity of social and economic activities within the usually limited confines of metropolitan boundaries.

This Guidebook to Urban Sustainability Indicators presents a comprehensive guide for assessing sustainable urban development. It covers thirteen thematic areas pertaining to sustainability of cities and urban areas, which have direct implications on spatial planning and policies, namely Land, Community, Economy, Transport, Biodiversity, Food, Energy, Climate, Air, Water, Waste, Governance and, Culture, and considers how they interlink with one another. The Guidebook aims to advance the knowledge of sustainable urban development and cities through cross-disciplinary thinking and evaluation. It presents sustainability performance indicators for self-assessment and benchmarking cities, and includes both qualitative and quantitative indicators. It draws on a wide range of international databases such as the World Bank’s Environmental Performance Indicators to local databases like the Sustainable Seattle Indicators. In total, over 1,100 indicators for sustainable development were studied and feature in the Guidebook. These indicators are organized into sub-themes or dimensions, each representing an area of focus or principle of sustainability.

This book is a must read for those who want to have better understanding of the concept of integrated sustainability of urban development from a holistic perspective, rather than approaching sustainability from a single thematic issue. Scholars and students in Urban Planning, Urban Design, and Sustainability Assessment as well as urban professionals, planners and designers, policy makers and municipal authorities will benefit greatly from the diversity and the depth of each theme presented.