Measuring city performance and diagnosing city challenges: a decision-making framework for policymaking and urban design

Leach, Joanne Michelle ORCID: 0000-0001-7526-624X (2020). Measuring city performance and diagnosing city challenges: a decision-making framework for policymaking and urban design. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

With the world’s population continuing to urbanise, achieving liveable and sustainable cities is essential for our survival. Liveable sustainability brings together sustainability’s long-term, large-scale goals with liveability’s more immediate ones. How liveable sustainability is measured and assessed varies by scale, scope, and geography, and there are many methods from which to choose. This confusion inevitably hinders progress against the numerous problems facing cities.

Achieved through the development of a bespoke decision-making framework, this research reveals the issues with diagnosing urban challenges and with measuring and assessing urban liveability and sustainability. It exposes how existing methods fall short, largely because of how they use and manage data, and uncovers fundamental flaws in both decision-making based upon existing measurement and assessment methods, and the arising interventions in the urban landscape.

The decision-making framework comprises a means of diagnosing urban challenges (the Urban Diagnostic Method), a city analysis method linking liveable sustainability with its measurement, an indicator-based measurement and assessment method (UK City LIFEn: UK City Liveable-sustainability Framework Edition N) for measuring and assessing liveable sustainability at the city scale, and a decision-making process (the Liveable Cities Method) that determines the need for, and resilience of, interventions in the urban landscape.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):