La Responsabilidad en la Comunicación del Gerente

This section will provide answers to the research question proposed at the beginning of this chapter:

What methods are being proposed in current literature to systematically monitor the urban environment?

Indicator tools and their components

In the first paragraph of this chapter we have given a general description of systems of indicators as a method by which the urban environment may be monitored. As a general rule, indicator tools are structured according to a hierarchal structure of five levels, comprising the basic building blocks of the tool. The five levels are (section 4.1.2);

1. Sustainability dimensions – The core goals of sustainability, often based on the three dimensions of environmental preservation, social equity and economic vitality; 2. Urban sustainability issues – The topics of concern to sustainable urban

development, that need to be addressed to achieve the core goals, e.g. improve access to socio-economic opportunities;

3. Evaluation criteria – A set of aspects that need to be assessed in order to verify the response of the plan to the issue, e.g. access to public transport, access to jobs and access to local services;

68 4. Design indicators – Variables whose value is indicative of the performance of the design, with a unit and often a specific measurement method, e.g. percent of residents within 300m walking distance of a public transit stop, average distance to the nearest doctor;

5. Benchmarks – Reference values that the indicators need to meet to correspond to quality levels, often in different range groups.

Availability of indicator tools discussed in literature

We have ascertained that the built environment can be monitored on three levels of scale; the building-, the neighborhood-, and the city wide scale. Furthermore, indicator tools are available to assess quality and/or sustainability across stages of the building life cycle. Indicator tools may be able to assess sustainability of a project in reference to a certain ‘desirable state’, as discussed in chapter three, or assist in the assessment of the process towards such a ‘desirable state’ by facilitating in design choices.

Tools on building scale are available for any stage of the building lifecycle, evaluating projects in reference to, or the process towards a desirable state.

Readily available tools for the assessment of quality and sustainability on a neighborhood scale, as discussed by literature, focus exclusively on the process towards a ‘desirable state’. There are currently no easily implementable tools discussed in literature, for the evaluation of the current quality and sustainability of the urban environment on a neighborhood scale. On city scale, methodologies are available by which communities can implement their own system of indicators to monitor the urban environment. These urban systems of indicators focus on the operation of the urban environment in reference to certain benchmarks, the desired state.

Goal and scope of an indicator tool

Success of indicator schemes can be determined in relation to four characteristics (section 4.1.1). Three of these characteristics can be translated into design questions for an indicator tool:

 Policy relevance: Who is going to use the tool?  Readily implemented: How is the tool going to be used?  Usable for decision making: Why is the tool going to be used?

Answering the three design question should lead to formulation of the goal and scope of an indicator tool. The fourth characteristic “scientifically sound” functions as quality control for the individual indicators and the system of indicators as a whole.

69 Seven considerations for the development of an indicator tool

There are a number of issues that should be considered in the development of an indicator tool, dependent on the goal and scope of the tool. The points to be considered are (section 4.4):

 Sustainability coverage:

What are the major themes included in the NSA tools and how successful are they in assessing neighborhoods' performance in a comprehensive and integrated way?  Inclusion of pre-requisites:

Whether there are strategies to assure the achievement of a certain level of performance.

 Adaptation to locality:

Have the NSA tools considered the context-specific needs and priorities in their assessments.

 Scoring and weighting:

What methods are used by NSA tools to score and weigh different criteria and how rigorous is this process?

 Participation:

What mechanisms are utilized by the NSA tools to involve different stakeholders during the development and operational stages?

 Presentation of results:

How do NSA tools report the results of assessment and to what extent are they useful as decision support systems?

 Applicability:

How practical are the NSA tools and what strategies can be taken to increase their applicability?

Towards the framework for the development of a new indicator tool

This chapter has focused attention on an explanation of the basic building blocks (section 4.1) and the general principles (section 4.4) of a system of indicators and illustrated this with an example (section 4.2). An overview of available indicator tools on the various scales of the urban environment has been provided in section 4.3, without going into any detail.

This chapter forms the basis for the framework constructed in the next chapter. This framework can be applied to develop indicator tools for the assessment of the quality and sustainability of existing urban environment in a structured way.

70

5. Framework for the development of a neighborhood