Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
alert some cities that they are well behind the standards being achieved by other
centres. This will hopefully stimulate grass-roots groups to demand political action
to improve their conditions. By comparing scores through time cities will also be
able to judge the extent to which progress in sustainability is being achieved, not
only in a total sense, but also through the individual indicators.
Yet despite its utility there are limitations of the Green Index method. One is that
it is mainly restricted to environmental indicators. So it does not deal with many of
the human dimensions that some people see as part of sustainability, although many
of these issues are being dealt with in the Just City and Human Capability research
described in Chap. 3. Another issue is that only some of the large range of dimen-
sions identified with the sustainability conceptual summary shown in Fig.
5.1
, are
incorporated in this the Green Index. Hence it needs to be interpreted as a partial
view of urban sustainability, although it is important to stress that this limitation is
largely associated with the difficulty of finding accurate data for the cities chosen.
A more critical technical issue comes from the fact that not all of the indicators are
based on quantitative data. Some involve rank order judgements, which results in
the questionable practice of integrating hard and soft data in what is then presented
as a final quantitative scale. In addition, some may argue that many of the quan-
titative variables are measuring quite different things, so questions can be raised
about whether these variables should be added together, even when they are scaled,
although this seems to be a common practice in the field. Another note of cau-
tion comes from the fact that some of the spatial units used are based on political
jurisdictions, not on continuous built-up areas. If the suburban areas around these
centres are taken into account, part of the high degree of sustainability in some cities
would be reduced, and some of the low scores in places that are primarily central
cities would be increased. Nevertheless, the Green Index does make an attempt to
provide exact scores rather than only the rank order listing found in many other
sustainability indices, which often disguises the actual value differences between
the centres. So despite the caveats that have been raised about its construction, the
Green Index provides the most useful first stage comparison of the extent of the
environmental part of sustainability between cities at a world scale. This is a big
advance on the various regional or city-specific scales that have been produced in
many centres, for these results cannot be generalised to other cities.
54
Creating More Sustainable Inputs and Outputs
It follows from the conceptual and practical schemes discussed above that the cre-
ation of a more sustainable future will come from using less resources, removing—
or at least reducing—pollution and waste, especially man's created compounds, in
addition to improving human capabilities. Many individual policies in various sec-
tors of the environment and in society are being adopted to achieve this aim. How-
ever, a more useful way of understanding the ways that this can be achieved is not to
look at these as separate variables and solutions, but to see them in terms of an urban
