10.2 The Urban Sustainability Indicators Project in Québec
Over the past 25 years, many cities and urban areas around the world have instituted
initiatives for sustainable development. The measures that they have taken to achieve
their goals have included: waste management programs, transit-oriented infrastructures, sustainable policies, urban decongestion, and much more. It is in this context
that research on the selection and use of USIs was conducted in order to measure the
impact of increasing investments in various sustainability projects, to account for the
environmental, social, and economic impacts of sustainability policies and practices,
and to assess the level of compliance to normative and policy frameworks that are
enacted by supra-municipal governments.
In 2008, a research program was launched at CIRANO to analyze the sustainability performance of the largest cities in Québec. Achieving such an objective
implies examining existing approaches from other cities and calculating the
suggested indicators based on the available data for the Québec cities. However, a
review of the academic literature on the issue revealed a wide variety of indicators
and approaches to select from and adapt to the urban context in Québec. This lack of
consensus in the literature arises from various points of view.
First, from the political point of view, the implementation of sustainability into
urban policies generally takes two different paths. On one hand, it may originally
follow the dissemination to the local scale of Agenda 21, the global action plan of the
Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. The Agenda 21 action plan for
local governments identifies several measures and goals to achieve. In such a case,
cities have progressively adopted new regulations, policies, and practices following
the local Agenda 21 recommendations. On the other hand, other cities adopted
sustainability as a branding tool in order to attract investments in the context of
globalization and regional competitiveness. In such a case, cities were taking
advantage of the inconsistent definition of sustainability to develop their own
definitions and justify good performance by using customized assessment indicators.
As a result, sustainability became a buzzword for local government discourses and in
planning to justify the relevance of projects.
Second, from a conceptual viewpoint, sustainability is often confused with the
preservation of the environment or used interchangeably with the concept of quality
of life in existing urban experiences. In the first case, many cities and urban areas
associate sustainable development solely with environmental concerns (Government
of Québec 2012). In other words, planning under the banner of sustainability was
primarily seen as addressing environmental issues (e.g., municipal composting
systems). In the second case, the concepts of urban sustainability and quality of
life were used interchangeably, especially in political discourse. Such substitution of
the concept of sustainability for that of quality of life is erroneous, given that the
search for a better quality of life essentially involves the search for optimum
conditions favoring the establishment of households and is done primarily for the
existing generation. In this case, a municipality could promote the quality of life of
its present-day citizens without addressing other issues relevant to sustainability
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G. A. Tanguay and J. Rajaonson
Over the past 25 years, many cities and urban areas around the world have instituted
initiatives for sustainable development. The measures that they have taken to achieve
their goals have included: waste management programs, transit-oriented infrastructures, sustainable policies, urban decongestion, and much more. It is in this context
that research on the selection and use of USIs was conducted in order to measure the
impact of increasing investments in various sustainability projects, to account for the
environmental, social, and economic impacts of sustainability policies and practices,
and to assess the level of compliance to normative and policy frameworks that are
enacted by supra-municipal governments.
In 2008, a research program was launched at CIRANO to analyze the sustainability performance of the largest cities in Québec. Achieving such an objective
implies examining existing approaches from other cities and calculating the
suggested indicators based on the available data for the Québec cities. However, a
review of the academic literature on the issue revealed a wide variety of indicators
and approaches to select from and adapt to the urban context in Québec. This lack of
consensus in the literature arises from various points of view.
First, from the political point of view, the implementation of sustainability into
urban policies generally takes two different paths. On one hand, it may originally
follow the dissemination to the local scale of Agenda 21, the global action plan of the
Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. The Agenda 21 action plan for
local governments identifies several measures and goals to achieve. In such a case,
cities have progressively adopted new regulations, policies, and practices following
the local Agenda 21 recommendations. On the other hand, other cities adopted
sustainability as a branding tool in order to attract investments in the context of
globalization and regional competitiveness. In such a case, cities were taking
advantage of the inconsistent definition of sustainability to develop their own
definitions and justify good performance by using customized assessment indicators.
As a result, sustainability became a buzzword for local government discourses and in
planning to justify the relevance of projects.
Second, from a conceptual viewpoint, sustainability is often confused with the
preservation of the environment or used interchangeably with the concept of quality
of life in existing urban experiences. In the first case, many cities and urban areas
associate sustainable development solely with environmental concerns (Government
of Québec 2012). In other words, planning under the banner of sustainability was
primarily seen as addressing environmental issues (e.g., municipal composting
systems). In the second case, the concepts of urban sustainability and quality of
life were used interchangeably, especially in political discourse. Such substitution of
the concept of sustainability for that of quality of life is erroneous, given that the
search for a better quality of life essentially involves the search for optimum
conditions favoring the establishment of households and is done primarily for the
existing generation. In this case, a municipality could promote the quality of life of
its present-day citizens without addressing other issues relevant to sustainability
184
G. A. Tanguay and J. Rajaonson