A criterion for modelling the ‘live-and-work’ city index using sustainable development indicators

Abstract

Measuring and comparing sustainable development levels of cities are essential procedures in creating and maintaining sustainable urban futures. This paper introduces a new urban sustainability assessment model: The Live-and-Work (LaW) City Index. It intends to enumerate/evaluate all targeted individual indicators in a simple, comprehensive manner, where all could be overseen solely, thus tracking their progress towards targeted values, assisting policymakers by providing an interpreted integrated sustainability assessment framework. The model incorporated all related domains affecting urban sustainable development; in a method that is further extended to gauge and rank cities’ performance. A functional form of aggregated indicators is derived to compute the overall index, illustrated in the form of a pie/radar chart. For proofing and calibrating the effectiveness and reliability of the model, it has been applied to three different cities. The results have shown that the model has the communicative advantage in comparative levels of different values.

Keywords

• sustainable development
• knowledge-based urban development
• urban assessment
• composite indicators
• indicator-based assessment