Sustainable city rankings, benchmarking and indexes: Looking into the black box

Sáez, Lucía; Saizarbitoria, Iñaki Heras; Rodríguez-Núñez, Estibaliz

doi:10.1016/j.scs.2019.101938

Cited by 48 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Ranking are receiving increasing attention as calculative technologies for measuring and managing cities (Argento et al, 2020;Brorström et al, 2018;Cohen & Karatzimas, 2021;Elgert, 2018;Kaika, 2017;Kitchin et al, 2015;Saez et al, 2020). Yet, they are not 'just an easy way' of representing cities (Czarniawska, 2010;Lapsley et al, 2010).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Instead, rankings and related measures are an information policy device that is essential to defining, mediating and even governing cities' development and future (Brorström et al, 2018;Kornberger & Carter, 2010). In other words, rankings not only reflect and describe the particular status of cities and what is "out there" in an urban hierarchy but can also prescribe and shape urban visions and be used in policy-making (Acuto et al, 2021;Elgert, 2018;Kaika, 2017;Saez et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Criticising previous city rankings, Giffinger and Gudrun call for more transparent and methodologically advanced rankings that can facilitate learning, dialogue and multiple perspectives on SC development . Yet, despite the many new SC rankings that emerged during the last decade, inspired by this call and by increased interest in sustainability (Escolar et al, 2019;Saez et al, 2020), empirical investigation of their inner workings is lacking. It remains unclear whether contemporary rankings, as calculative technologies, reflect and support the complex dynamics of SCs under a human-centric dialogic vision and give space for the polyphonic development of cities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Rankings for smart city dialogue? Opening up a critical scrutiny

Aleksandrov

Dybtsyna

Grossi

et al. 2022

JPBAFM

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PurposeThis paper aims to explore whether and how contemporary rankings reflect the dialogic development of smart cities.Design/methodology/approachThis paper is based on the synthesis of smart city (SC), rankings and dialogic accounting literature. It first analyses ranking documents and related methodologies and measures and then reflects on four SC rankings, taking a critical stand on whether they provide space for the polyphonic development of smart cities.FindingsThis study argues that rankings do not include divergent perspectives and visions of smart cities, trapping cities in a mirage of multiple voices and bringing about a lack of urban stakeholder engagement. In other words, there is a gap between the democratic demands on smart cities and what rankings provide to governments when it comes to dialogue. As such, rankings in their existing traditional and technocratic form do not serve the dynamic and complex nature of the SC agenda. This, in turn, raises the threat that rankings create a particular notion of smartness across urban development with no possibility of questioning it.Originality/valueThe paper responds to recent calls to critically examine the concept of the SC and the role that accounting has played in its development. This study brings new insights regarding the value of dialogic accounting in shaping a contemporary understanding of rankings and their criticalities in the SC agenda.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Rankings for smart city dialogue? Opening up a critical scrutiny

Aleksandrov

Dybtsyna

Grossi

et al. 2022

JPBAFM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…Private sector participants both facilitate and hinder sustainability-oriented approaches [6][7][8][9][10] at various scales. Cities tend to integrate sustainable development into their dynamic planning, while urban green space availability is pivotal to urban sustainability advancement.…”

Section: Real-time Urban Sustainability Assessment Tools In Environmementioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing Sustainability Behavior and Environmental Performance of Urban Systems: A Systematic Review

Pera

2020

Sustainability

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In this systematic review, I cumulate previous research findings indicating that sustainable urbanism and networked public governance can be instrumental in carrying out extensive sustainability and resilience objectives through steering urban transformations in the direction of sustainability and resilience. Urban analytics data infrastructure, multicriteria sustainability evaluation, and sustainable performance assessment display the intricate network dynamics operational within cities, impacting urban resilience decision-making processes and leading to equitable and sustainable urban development. Throughout July 2020, I conducted a quantitative literature review of the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest databases, search terms including “sustainable urban planning,” “urban sustainability assessment,” “sustainable urban governance/urban sustainability governance,” “sustainable urban development,” “sustainable/sustainability behavior,” and “environmental performance.” As I focused on research published exclusively in the past two years, only 301 various types of articles met the eligibility criteria. By removing those whose results were inconclusive, unconfirmed by replication, or too general, and because of space constraints, I selected 153, mainly empirical, sources. Future research should investigate whether the assessment of environmental sustainability performance of heterogeneous urban configurations by shared sustainability policymaking through spatial green infrastructure planning and regulations articulate sustainable urban design and governance for the development of innovative performance.

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“…If measuring sustainability is considered to be "measuring the immeasurable" [16] due to its "aspirational nature" [27] and because the ranking of urban sustainability can encourage policymakers to focus on the aspects that can be successful in their cities [28], an alternative way of studying urban sustainability problems may be necessary.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban Sustainability Deficits: The Urban Non-Sustainability Index (UNSI) as a Tool for Urban Policy

Raedo

2021

Sustainability

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Urban sustainability has been revealed as one of the key elements in achieving global sustainability. There is a wide range of indicators in this field; however, sustainability indicators have not been exempt from criticism, in both their formal aspects and practical usefulness. If measuring sustainability is “measuring the immeasurable”, then the objective of this article is to propose a composite indicator that evaluates only the deficits of sustainability or, which is the same thing, the unsustainability of cities. This focus has the advantage of showing up the particular deficiencies and thus the priorities that each city must attend to. For this purpose, only unsustainability, defined as the distance to a sustainability target, was considered. Aggregation was carried out through generalized means, which lead to a proper balance between compensatory and non-compensatory aggregation. The results emerging from the application of our methodology to a sample of fifty different cities suggest that all cities should attend to some aspect concerning sustainability, and that no city is sustainable, but only less unsustainable, showing both significant differences between cities in terms of the degree of unsustainability and a common underlying structure of unsustainability in which the environmental dimension contributes the most.

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Sustainable city rankings, benchmarking and indexes: Looking into the black box

Cited by 48 publications

References 44 publications

Rankings for smart city dialogue? Opening up a critical scrutiny

Rankings for smart city dialogue? Opening up a critical scrutiny

Assessing Sustainability Behavior and Environmental Performance of Urban Systems: A Systematic Review

Urban Sustainability Deficits: The Urban Non-Sustainability Index (UNSI) as a Tool for Urban Policy

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