Monitoring a City: Exploring Sustainable-Development Indicators for European Cities

The use of indicators to measure urban sustainability is highlighted in Agenda 21 and has been emphasised as an important instrument at many of the European Conferences on Sustainable Cities and Towns. This study is an explorative analysis of eight European cities to determine what aspects of sustainable development are measured, what reasons are given for using indicators to measure urban sustainability, and to what extent uniformity has been included in indicator design. The most striking findings may be that the indicators were not equally distributed across aspects of sustainability and that almost all of the 332 identified indicators were differently defined. Further, a pressure-state-response (PSR) analysis revealed that most indicators focused on the state aspect.