A tool for measuring sustainability of cities. Case study on Eastern European states

Abstract

The objective of our research was to design a tool for analyzing the progress made on the way to a sustainable urban development, that can be applied and tested at different levels. In the research we carried out, it was started from the study of the various existing tools at the world and European level regarding the analysis of sustainability and of  relevant indicators in the context of urban sustainability. Based on them, we designed our own system of indicators - components of a composite index that gave us the opportunity to compare and make a ranking between the European states that we analyzed from the point of view of the indicators taken into account. We carried out the sustainability assessment with the help of a composite indicator resulting from the assessment of 3 key areas: economic, environmental and social, each area being divided into several categories, each category including a certain number of indicators. A very important criterion regarding the choice of indicators was the availability of their values, which led us to perform the analysis at the level of the 11 chosen European states. The reasoning behind the calculation of the composite indicator was based on the use of the AHP method to determine the importance coefficients associated with each indicator. A group of 3 experts analyzed each key domain, subdomain and group of indicators, to establish the relative importance of the subdomains, the groups of indicators in each subdomain, and the indicators in each group.In the future, we propose to expand our research, using the tool designed by us and to identify those indicators that best reflect the needs and objectives of the cities in Romania in order to compare them in terms of sustainable urban development and to support local authorities with ideas and solutions in this direction.