Main themes
Sustainable Cities
Social Inclusion
Governance
Environment
Economy

Title
Multidimensional Sustainability Benchmarking for Megacities

Focus
The lecture will explore multidimensional sustainability assessment options for megacities, including: London, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo to assess performance on economic, environmental and social performance indicators.

Issues which the lecture addresses
Urban sustainability assessment is required for the purposes of establishing strategic directions for ‘greening’ our cities to reduce the environmental impact of their performance, improve employment and economic viability and enhance the quality of life. This paper considers large world cities: London, New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Berlin, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. To assess urban sustainability performance, the paper applied multi-criteria decision aid tools to compare the cities on the range of dimensions. The tools chosen for this assessment are ELECTRE III, NAIADE and APIS. The results have shown that Singapore dominates the sustainability rankings in most multi-criteria applications, showing particular strength in economic and environmental dimensions and a slightly less strong performance in the social dimension according to the APIS results. The paper explores innovative sustainability strategy and new governance structures in Singapore and discusses the reasons for such success.

Short analysis of the above issues
Urban sustainability is understood as a multi-dimensional capacity of a city to operate successfully in economic, social and environmental domains simultaneously. This topic receives a lot of attention in the EU, USA and increasingly China and Latin America since the Rio Summit of 1992, the Rio+20 Summit in 2012 and, especially, in the light of the forthcoming HABITAT III forum to be held 17-20 October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador. The new UN Habitat World Cities Report firmly links the New Urban Agenda with Sustainable Development Goals (UN Habitat, 2016). UNEP Green Economy Report highlighted urban sustainability as one of its important dimensions (UNEP 2011). Major city governments formed a C40 partnership to make important steps forward in climate change mitigation at the urban scale. A new ISO 37120 standard has been developed to address the sustainable development of communities (ISO, 2014). There is considerable literature on international sustainable urban policy developments (Hall, 2014), (Hall et al, 2010), (Hall and Pfeiffer, 2004), Girardet (2014). A new interdisciplinary perspective on a sustainable city, representing it as a system of interacting dimensions: urban planning, energy, transport, material flows, green space, etc. has been proposed in (Shmelev and Shmeleva, 2009). Such a multidimensional nature of an urban system determined the choice of a main analytical approach for sustainability assessment employed in the present article, namely the methodology of Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (Roy, 1996).

Propositions for addressing the issue
* This paper aims to consider twelve major megacities to identify the sustainability leaders as well as cities experiencing the strongest sustainability challenges.
*First, we analyse a large set of twenty indicators describing the twelve leading megacities in Europe, North and South America, Asia and Oceania. We perform the Principal Component Analysis and identify major relationships between social, economic and environmental factors. We then reduce the set of indicators and perform Multi-Criteria Analysis using different tools.
* Due to the multi-dimensional nature of sustainability, we propose to use Multi-Criteria Decision Aid tools to perform sustainability benchmarking for megacities;
* We test the performance of several analytical Multi-Criteria Decision Aid (MCDA) tools: ELimination Et Choix Traduisant la REalité (ELECTRE III), Novel Approach to Imprecise Assessment and Decision Environment (NAIADE) and Aggregated Preference Indices System (APIS);
* We perform sensitivity analysis and test various policy priorities, which leads to identification of Singapore featuring consistently high in most sustainability assessment settings as one of the most sustainable among the cities in the pool of 12 according to the set of selected indicators;
*We conclude with a description of sustainability strategies and policies adopted in the leading city of our pool, which could help us to understand its success.

Additional Reading Materials
Shmelev S.E. (ed) (2016) Green Economy Reader: Lectures in Ecological Economics and Sustainability, Springer, 463 pp.
Shmelev S.E. (2012) Ecological Economics: Sustainability in Practice, Springer, 248 pp.