The Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) has been calculated for many countries, but rarely at the local level. This paper shows how the index has been calculated for the Province of Siena, Central Italy. The whole procedure is illustrated step by step, including the search for the most suitable and precise methods to obtain reliable values for each item composing the index. Application of ISEW at a very local level was found to be feasible. The most general difficulty encountered was the lack of an adequate institutionalised source of statistical information to support the construction of indicators other than purely economic or demographic ones. The availability of data depends on the interest in implementing projects of sustainable management of natural resources and land on the part of local authorities and their consequent willingness to invest money and human resources on such projects. The ISEW is a good tool for local environmental policy, because it gives a more realistic representation of the well-being of the population than GDP, since it includes environmental and social items not considered in conventional national accounting. Furthermore, in Italy, the principle of administrative decentralization has been implemented in recent years to such an extent that the central government devolved part of its power to Regions, Provinces and Municipalities. Arguably, local authorities should therefore allocate more resources to pursue their policies towards sustainability, an issue which modern electoral campaigns are often based on. The results for the Province of Siena show that there is a large gap between local GDP and ISEW (about 37% of GDP).

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A city can be conceived as a complex self-adaptive system. The multiple interactions among its structural elements and dynamic agents, its organization on multiple time-space scales, its exchanges with the external context, its irreversible dynamics, are signs of complexity. Some concepts from the evolutionary thermodynamics, such us the theory of dissipative structures, could be extended to the city in order to investigate its behaviour. This theoretical framework suggests to analyze the city in terms of entropy and negentropy production. An emergy analysis (spelled with an "m") of an urban region is presented in order to investigate how cities maintain their organization (and decrease their entropy) by virtue of constant energy inflows from the external environment. As a result, a non-homogeneous spatial pattern of emergy density is shown as an attempt to investigate the multiple relations and energy exchanges that take place in an urban region. This approach to urban studies introduces a new energy-based vision to understand cities.

This paper presents a time series analysis of the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW). It is a measure, alternative to GDP, that in accordance with the principles of sustainability takes into consideration environmental and social aspects within the traditional economic accounting system. The Index is calculated for an Italian Province from 1971 to 2003 and it will be compared with the provincial GDP during the same period. A growing gap between the two monetary values (GPI grows faster then ISEW) has been occurring consistently with the national trend. This means that part of the wealth which GDP asserts does not correspond to welfare. The ISEW monetizes this gap in order to orient decisions for a more sustainable way of life and more correct policies.