Multidimensional Sustainability Benchmarking for Smart Cities and Regions

A new strategic direction for ‘greening’ our cities and making them smart to reduce the environmental impact of their performance, increase employment and economic viability and enhance the quality of life requires a thorough assessment of sustainability and smart urban performance.

This panel will consider three groups of cities: large world cities: London, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo; dynamic European and North American cities: Washington DC, San Francisco, Boston, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Geneva, Munich, Zurich, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Vienna as well as cities of the global South, such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, Istanbul, Mumbai, Delhi, Almaty, Johannesburg, Kampala, Nairobi and will explore linkages between different sustainability and smart city dimensions.

To assess urban sustainability performance, we will apply various multi-criteria decision aid tools to a panel of 20+ indicators. The assessment will focus on economic performance, unemployment, CO2 emissions in cities, air pollution, public transport and cycling patterns, waste recycling, the water-energy nexus as well as the role of smart and creative economy.

The key assessment outcomes could be essential for policy makers across the globe as the assessment could benchmark a city or a region against the world leaders and uncover the necessary policy changes that need to be made to improve a city’s performance. Additional focus will be on the inter-industry linkages and an example of Singapore, one of the leaders in sustainability thinking and environmental policy, will be considered from the point of view of growth – emissions – employment linkages across sectors.

The panel will discuss various approaches to sustainability benchmarking as well as projects and decisions focused on urban regeneration, planning and design that could be instrumental in explaining the success of most sustainable cities around the globe and chart the vision for the future.