Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Are Green Cities Nice Places To Live? Examining The Link Between Urban Sustainability And Quality Of Life, David S. Bieri

David S Bieri

The growing importance of nonmarket assets such as the environment, combined with the unprecedented availability of high-resolution data, has renewed broad interest in quantifying sustainability at different spatial levels. Policy-related decision making requires that potential sustainability measures meet three key requirements; (i) sustainability metrics need to be comprehensive such that they reflect the experience of representative households; (ii) sustainability indices need to be comparable across different geographic scales, and; (iii) measures of sustainability need to be economically meaningful, ideally tying into the larger system of national accounts. However, conventional sustainability indices do not tend to meet these criteria, rendering them …