Home to one-fifth of the world's population, South Asian countries act as loci for interlinked sustainability issues owing to rapid urbanization. Given the context of formidable problems that threaten to overwhelm the region's cities and towns, the localization of SDG 11 has become desirable for sustainability. This paper reviews the literature encapsulating the progress of developing economies such as China, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia towards SDG 11 and intends to extract substantiated strategies adopted for comprehensive localization of the goal through certain examples. The results conglomerate key enablers such as inclusive institutional and financial environment, stakeholder engagement for the reorganization of people-centered resource flows, efficient data ecosystems to promote social innovation, and adaptive policy reform measures for generating cross-cutting innovative solutions. These enablers serve as the initial step for informing the essential parameters required to prepare the contextual framework of SDG 11 for Indian cities and induce a paradigm shift with informed policy decisionmaking at the city level.

Since the conception of the Agenda 2030, indicator based systems formulated as sustainability assessment tools on different scopes and geographical scales of urban development strive for ubiquitous application of the 17 SDGs globally. The execution of these goals in India as well are focused through formal assessment tools with standardized indicators of sustainability at various levels. However, semantic literature perusal and analysis of these tools show us a substantial lag towards their enactment as subordinates to one another and in promoting the effective translation of SDG targets as local level indicators among the pillars of sustainability. The study thus intends to abate the gap in existing literature focusing on sustainability issues of India and direct a discussion towards sculpturing the SDG indicators as core dimensions of city development plans than just as performance assessors of the cities.

No abstract