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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today I will introduce a research paper by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original paper, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole paper.

Our summary today works with the article titled Measuring urban sustainability: the potential and pitfalls of city rankings from 2012 by Phil McManus, published in the Australian Geographer journal. Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see an investigation into Sydney’s sustainability. This article discusses how Sydney could become more sustainable and identifies why normative urban sustainability rankings should be recognised for their potential while simultaneously being treated with caution.

If measuring sustainability means that we are getting serious about sustainability, then what we measure and how we measure it must be considered very carefully. Measuring can too easily become equated with objectivity. Recent attempts to measure and rank the sustainability of Australian cities in relation to each other and to other cities internationally highlight the pitfalls of measuring and ranking the sustainability of cities.

Sustainability is a goal that can be traced back to 1987 to growing environmental awareness generally and concerns about improving urban environments in particular. Urban sustainability is, however, contentious. Some argue that sustainable city is an oxymoron because cities are never sustainable, while others situate urban sustainability within larger notions of sustainable society and a sustainable world. The growth of cities in physical and demographic sense highlights the need to improve sustainability as a prime concern of city governance. Ideas include various notions of greening cities, developing new eco-cities and retrofitting existing cities to make them denser. The quest to improve the sustainability of cities often leads to the question of which cities are most sustainable, thereby encouraging the formulation of metrics to compare cities on this criterion.

Indicator projects have been undertaken in economic, social and environmental domains over many years. However, questions remain about who produces urban sustainability indicators, why they produce these, which cities should be studied, what criteria to use, how to weight the criteria and how to represent the findings. Urban sustainability indicators are produced by a variety of organisations for different purposes. These organisations can be environmental ones trying to improve urban sustainability, promoting green citizenship and sustainable capitalism, and consultancy groups.

Comparative indicators are generally initiated at a higher level or at a distance when compared with community-based indicators because they are comparing indicators in various locations. Many comparative sustainability initiatives critique the lack of government action and are designed to stimulate meaningful government and private-sector action in urban areas. Comparative indicators define the objects of calculation, they name and shame, and they have a clear normative directionality through which improved performance is made apparent. This normative aspect is being scrutinised in this article, particularly the translation of performance-based on indicators to sustainability policy and planning.

McManus continued with the introduction of many different rankings from around the globe, then highlighted two rankings, the Mercer Eco-City rankings and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) Sustainable Cities Index in regards to Sydney’s assessment. Mercer uses New York City as a baseline of 100, and includes six criteria: water availability, water potability, waste removal, sewerage, air pollution and traffic congestion. Mercer emphasises the existing physical conditions rather than environmental participation, resilience to risk or the existence of programs, but this is aligned with Mercer’s goal to provide information about current conditions. The ACF Sustainable Cities Index intended to report on the existing sustainability of cities with a goal to implement changes that would increase urban sustainability in the 20 largest Australian cities, using 15 criteria: air quality, ecological footprint, green buildings, water, biodiversity, health, density, well-being, transport, employment, climate change readiness, education, food production, public participation, and household dept.

The application of diverse ranking systems, prepared for differing purposes and containing different variable and ways of measuring the variables will inevitably lead to varying results. Many Australian cities appear to perform markedly better or worse than others depending on which of the two ranking systems is chosen. Generally speaking, Sydney seems to be towards the bottom end of the major Australian cities in both sustainability ranking systems. While caution is needed because of the different criteria employed and boundaries being used, the intention of this comparison is to demonstrate the inconsistencies in ranking and to relate these to the research methodology.

If we were to accept either of these two studies uncritically and implemented plans to improve the comparative sustainability ranking of Sydney as an example, what would likely to happen? Mercer would suggest focus on congestion, which could be done by public transport investments, pricing and limiting road use, road constructions, or other ways to limit car usage. These would alleviate the congestion problems for a short while, but probably would not solve the sustainability of the city. ACF would suggest focus on public participation, public well-being, reduction in household repayments, and improvement in air quality. All of these relate to Sydney’s ecological footprint.

However, if we consider these studies carefully in terms of their methodological biases rather than simply extrapolating potential actions, then a few significant points emerge. Mercer seems to favour compact cities with fewer children but with many cultural institutions, among others. Additionally, Mercer emphasises the congestion in transport rather than different modes and absence of density. One must question whether penalising a city for congestion is more effective than rewarding a city such as Sydney for low private car ownership per capita as a catalyst for moving towards sustainability, which was valued by the ACF assessment. In this sense, comparative sustainable ranking schemes do matter.

It is worth noting areas for further inquiry. The inclusion of ecological footprint analysis would appear to be duplicating another sustainability methodology and potentially double counting individual items, such as water consumption, fuel used in transport, and so on. Comparing the sustainability of cities based on factors such as education levels is also problematic, especially given the migration of many younger people from smaller cities and industrial cities to the large cities in search of education and employment opportunities. What is being measured is education relative to demographics, particularly the age of a population, but with little regard given to the level of education needed for a resident to gain employment in their current city, assuming that these employment opportunities will be maintained in the future.

While we may be taking sustainability more seriously by measuring it, how sustainability is defined, what we are measuring and how we are doing it are important questions which influence our results. The investigated rankings were not government based, but often aimed at naming and shaming to make governments, citizens, and the private sector more aware of the unsustainable aspects to improve urban sustainability. The metrics used, however, implicitly define the problem to be solved and often provide the answer to the question. When differing sustainability concepts are invoked and different metrics privileged, this could change the results.

Ranking is not, or should not be an end in itself. It is a means to an end which varies between organisations participating in ranking schemes. McManus advocated for more sustainable city as part of wider moves towards sustainability. In Sydney that would mean reducing the ecological footprint, greenhouse gas emissions and increasing conserved water, among others. These actions should be enhanced, regardless of the existence or otherwise of urban sustainability ranking systems. Where comparative urban sustainability rankings may be useful is to highlight this sustainability agenda.

It appears that the main attribute of sustainability ranking exercises is to focus attention on urban sustainability. The potential of ranking cities to contribute to sustainability is worth pursuing. This potential will not be realised in a single ranking exercise but will emerge through time as rankings conducted over a number of years highlight changes in the sustainability performance of each city. In this way, not only is a city compared with other cities in a healthy competition, but perhaps more importantly is benchmarked against meaningful targets for achieving sustainability while simultaneously compared with its own past performance.

As the most important things, I would like to highlight 3 aspects:

1. Sustainability ranking results differ based on the producers, methods, purposes, and many other factors.
2. Sustainable rankings need to be used to start conversations about urban sustainability and encourage actions, but cannot be the final aim.
3. Cities need to be ranked over and over again, thus, they are being benchmarked against themselves and their progress can be measured.

Additionally, it would be great to talk about the following questions:

1. How can we then use sustainability rankings to help establish strategies and actions? Which one should we believe or how can we establish which is the proper one for our own cities?
2. Why do we keep compare cities globally? Yes, cities can learn from each other but what works in North America might not work in Ethiopia. Comparing them on the same set of indicators seems just not right.
3. Have you ever looked at some sustainability rankings to see how your city performs? Have you ever wondered why that is the result?

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