City’s Sustainable Development and Indicators for Its Measurement
Modern Russian urban planning policy contradicts the ideas of sustainable development and creates significant risks: uncontrolled suburbanization, traffic jams etc. To eliminate such risks approaches to sustainable urban development are widely used, including a system of sustainability indicators. The article presents a comparative analysis of existing approaches. Their main advantage is the possibility of international comparisons. The limitations of these approaches are incomplete reflection of urban development specifics, lack of emphasis on a breakthrough direction for the city, the use of a limited list of indicators and the subjectivity of the methodology. We proposed a new approach to defining sustainable city where the emphasis is put on the city’s ability to attract and produce resources and direct them to the balanced development of all “sustainable dimensions”. For evaluating sustainability of city’s development mega-index of urban development was proposed based on the study of strategic documents of analog cities and competitor cities. The mega-index combines indicators measuring the breakthrough direction of urban transformation and classic sustainable development indicators, includes both standard indicators in numerical format, qualitative indicators and two-dimensional indicators based on big data. The mega-index is developed in 5 stages: at the first stage the cities-benchmarks are chosen; then strategic documents for these cities are analyzed; the third stage includes refining city’s image; at the fourth stage an old breakthrough strategy is modified; finally, indicators measuring implementation of breakthrough ambitious strategy are defined. An example of compiling mega-index for a small city developing tourism as a breakthrough direction is provided.