NDLI: Defining and measuring urban sustainability: a review of indicators

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Huang, Lu Wu, Jianguo Yan, Lijiao
Copyright Year	2015
Abstract	The sustainability of urban areas is essential to the sustainability of regions, nations, and the world as a whole. Urban sustainability indicators (USIs) can play an important role in advancing the science and practice of sustaining urban systems.We review the key concepts of urban sustainability and commonly used indicators for gauging the state and progress of urban sustainability, and discuss how USIs can be further improved from a landscape ecology perspective.This review is based primarily on peer-reviewed journal papers, as well as books, and documents published by international organizations, governmental agencies, and research institutions. We systematically examine what USIs actually measure and whether they are adequate for gauging urban sustainability, and then discuss major problems and challenges as well as ways forward in developing and applying USIs.Numerous USIs have been developed, including single composite indices and indicator sets. This paper focuses on three indicator sets and ten composite indices. Eight of them cover all the three dimensions of sustainability (environment, economy, and society), and five cover two of the three. Five of them measure strong sustainability, and eight only indicate weak sustainability.Urban sustainability indicators abound, and so do problems with them. These include technical issues of normalization, weighting, and aggregation (upscaling), as well as conceptual issues of indicator selection, boundary delineation, heterogeneity, scale, and strong versus weak sustainability. To overcome these problems, principles and methods in landscape ecology—particularly those of landscape metrics, spatial scaling, and landscape sustainability—have much to offer, and this represents a challenging and fruitful research direction for both landscape and urban scientists in the coming decades.
Starting Page	1175
Ending Page	1193
Page Count	19
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09212973
Journal	Landscape Ecology
Volume Number	30
Issue Number	7
e-ISSN	15729761
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2015-05-08
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Urbanization Urban sustainability indicators Indicator frameworks Sustainable cities Landscape sustainability Landscape Ecology Plant Ecology Forestry Management Forestry Ecology Plant Sciences
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Geography, Planning and Development Ecology Nature and Landscape Conservation

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