Indicators as assessment instruments for sustainable urban systems in the world and in Brazil

Abstract

The sustainability of urban systems is a major concern for managers around the world. In particular, developing cities must improve their management practices to establish sustainable urban systems. For this type of system to move towards sustainable development, it is essential to define principles, study and evaluate sustainability in social, economic and environmental criteria. To measure sustainability, it is necessary to use methods and instruments, such as indicators. These are parameters that provide information about the state of the environment, generating a quantitative value. In the meantime, the objective of the research was to identify the principles, criteria, assessment methods and indicators of urban sustainability developed and applied in the world and in Brazil to assist researchers who work with the management of urban systems. The documentary survey was carried out from November 2020 to March 2021 in scientific journals, with publications between 2016 and 2020. 187 articles were listed and analyzed. In this process, it was imperative to consider some exclusion criteria: not using indicators, deviating from the urban system and bibliographic review. At the end, a total of 49 articles were considered for qualitative and quantitative analysis. According to the data collected, it was found that the integration of the social criterion was the most common (33 articles in total - 82.5%), followed by the environmental (29 articles in total - 72.5%) and economic (27 articles in total - 67.5%). A total of 17 articles used the criteria: social, economic and environmental. It was found that there is no consensus on these criteria, however, the interdependence between them was identified.  Sustainability is not achieved by treating and applying the dimensions in isolation. It was also noticed that to assess urban sustainability, most articles used indexes (38.8%) and other methods, such as: Life Cycle Assessment, Material flow analysis, Multicriteria analysis and Scale-based assessment. Therefore, the set of principles and indicators of urban sustainability listed, allows to support future research, to communities and urban managers to diagnose problems and identify pressures that provide useful information to social, economic and environmental intervention, and, thus, achieve the longed for sustainable cities.