Citizen centric cities

What enables a city to meet present and future needs?

What enables a city
to meet present and future needs?

Sustainable cities can be thought of as places that are planned and managed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, providing a resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. Accordingly, measures of sustainability need to be able to measure current city performance, ability to mitigate future impacts as well as investment in future capability - ideally measured from the perspective of the citizen.

The Sustainable Cities Index is a broad measure of sustainability, encompassing measures of the social, environmental and economic health of cities as shown in Figure 1.

The Three Pillars

Figure 1: The three pillars of sustainability

The Sustainable Cities Index ranks 100 global cities on three pillars of sustainability: People, Planet and Profit. The three pillars are closely aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and track progress against UN SDG commitments covering:

Health and well-being
Water and sanitation
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable cities
Climate change impacts
Life on land
Partnership

The UN SDGs emphasize the cross-cutting nature of sustainability initiatives and the necessity for all cities to take a balanced approach in developing an agenda. In this release of the SCI, we bring an additional focus on how the characteristics of cities contribute to, or hold back, the development of sustainability initiatives. Understanding citizen needs and how cities function is key to identifying how initiatives to improve sustainability performance can be effectively implemented.

Metrics used to build the People sub-index indicators measure city performance in terms of:

Personal well-being (health, education, crime),

Working life (income inequality, working hours, the dependency ratio)

Urban living (transport accessibility, digital services and other amenities).

Data included in the Planet sub- index ranks cities according to environmental impacts covering:

Immediate needs of citizens (water supplies, sanitation and air pollution)

Long-term impacts (energy consumption, recycling rates, greenhouse gas emissions)

Investment in low carbon infrastructure (renewable energy, bicycle infrastructure and electric vehicle incentives)

City resilience (natural catastrophe exposure and risk monitoring)

Metrics underpinning the Profit sub-index include:

Effectiveness of transport infrastructure (rail, air and traffic congestion)

Economic performance (GDP per capita, employment rates, ease of doing business, tourism, position in global economic networks)

Business infrastructure (Mobile and broadband connectivity, employment rates and university technology research).

In 2018 we have revised the indicators of the indices to give greater emphasis to the digital capabilities of cities. We use the adoption of digital solutions as a proxy measure for the pace at which cities are equipping themselves to meet future needs. Connectivity, mobility, citizen engagement and disaster management are all areas where the adoption of new digital solutions will enable cities to accelerate their sustainable development.