Criteria for aggregating sustainable development indicators as a way of modeling through “live-and-work” city index

Abstract

Measuring and comparing sustainable development levels of cities, regions, and projects is an essential procedure in creating and maintaining sustainable urban futures.Introducing a new urban sustainable development assessment model: The Live and Work (LaW) City Model, as an indicator-based sustainable development indexing model, it aims to assist planners and policy makers in their decision-making procedures and development of cities by providing an integrated assessment framework. Several efforts were done to develop composite indicators, but it was concluded that most of them focused on environmental dimensions and neglected the overlapping of the other influential ones.The paper gives an overview of the nature and importance of composite indicators and how it can be structured and implemented precisely; overcoming its drawbacks, to gauge and rank the performance of cities across the demands of people, planet, and profit, as a way of achieving the live and work balance criteria.The methodology of the model is developed by following a set of logical steps such as; weighing, normalization, and aggregation of individual indicators. From here, a functional form for aggregation was derived to compute the index. Also, the structure of the model was illustrated in the form of a Pie/Radar chart.The visualized LaW City Index has the communicative advantage of being easy to convey comparative levels of different values. The total values computed could be used to rank cities in a tabular format and gauge their comparable sustainable development performance accordingly.The model can also estimate the sustainable development outcomes of alternative development scenarios during different year’s intervals. This can be achieved by stacking up different model scenarios; making it a relatively simple exercise for both the general public and decision-makers to comprehend