Sustainability assessment initiatives at the local level have been increasing in number since the mid-1990s and are now plentiful. The definitions of sustainable development used in sustainability assessment instruments, however, vary widely. This chapter illustrates the diversity of sustainability assessment tools available at the local level by presenting two indicator-based instruments developed in Switzerland. The first one, Cercle Indicateurs, is an all-encompassing sustainability assessment tool; the second one, Swiss City Statistics, focuses on the well-being and quality of life dimensions of sustainability. The two instruments are presented and analysed according to the Bellagio Sustainability Assessment and Measurement Principles (Bellagio STAMP), which have been grouped into five categories: (1) conceptual framework, (2) time and spatial scale, (3) participation, (4) transparency and communication, and (5) continuity and capacity. We suggest that transparency about the rationale for setting up a sustainability assessment instrument and about its actual implementation is crucial, because these aspects influence how ‘sustainability’ is operationalised and therefore the result of the assessment.

Given the persistent challenges of governing natural resources sustainably, there is an urgent need for comprehensive sustainability assessments that enable holistic understanding of current and future development scenarios. To spur necessary action, these assessments must also foster joint learning among multiple stakeholders. In this chapter, we present the ‘Sustainability Wheel’, a mixed-method, dialogue-based approach for assessing the sustainability of resource governance systems. The approach combines the transparent identification of general sustainability principles, the regional contextualisation of these as subprinciples/indicators, and the scoring of the indicators based on deliberative dialogue in interdisciplinary teams, drawing on shared knowledge and understandings. Using the approach to examine sustainable water governance in the Swiss Alps, we demonstrate its effectiveness in integrating multiple perspectives, including those deriving from qualitative and quantitative research, and in facilitating communication with stakeholders. Furthermore, we explore its application to urban systems.

The sustainability of urban systems is a pressing topic now, and will be even more so in the future. Currently, more that 50 percent of the world’s population (74 percent in the EU) lives in cities, and this share is expected to keep increasing, posing new challenges for sustainable development. Although cities only cover 3 percent of the earth’s surface, they account for 75 percent of global CO2 emissions, and consume about 75 percent of resources and produce 50 percent of the waste worldwide. However, cities also provide income (80 percent of global GDP) and education, and are hotspots for innovation (Acuto & Panel 2016; Wigginton, et al., 2016). The ambiguous role of cities poses large challenges and renders it necessary to develop tools to assess urban strategies and developments from a sustainability perspective.

Assessing urban sustainability is a crucial step towards solving the challenges we face today. Solutions to these challenges are likely to demand new and impressive levels of coordination: people will need to change their habits and learn to focus their actions in specific sustainable directions. The deeper nature of such challenges may be clarified through a classic concept from information theory and thermodynamics: entropy, both a measure of probability in the face of uncertainty and a measure of disorder. Arguing that the problem of entropy may throw light on issues of sustainability in social and urban systems, we propose in this chapter that sustainability can be stimulated by cities that enable us to coordinate better, reducing the entropy triggered by uncertainties and the unintended consequences of our actions. Investigating the role of cities in social entropy through a new agent-based model (ABM), we show that cities may play a crucial role in our conscious and unconscious efforts to cooperate.

Supplying cities with sustainable energy is a major challenge as this requires deep transformation of the supply infrastructure in order to reduce energy waste and rely on local renewable energy sources.  Building such a sustainable energy system requires a sound understanding of its entire supply chain and conversion steps from resources to final use so as to identify savings potential and prioritise actions. This chapter presents a systematic approach to assess the sustainability of energy systems that enables decision makers to build evidence-based strategies and take informed measures towards carbon neutral cities.

A wealth of indicators and indicator sets, structured in the form of standards (e.g., ISO, OECD, SDG Index, etc.), have been developed and proposed over the past decades to define and measure urban sustainability. Unfortunately, literature studies confirm that there is a lack of knowledge systematisation for such indicator sets in the sustainability assessment domain. In this chapter, we present and describe a formal representation of knowledge about sustainability indicators and their interrelationships, through the development of a domain ontology. To increase the potential for its adaptability and reuse, as well as to facilitate its continuous redevelopment, we make the developed ontology available online, through a dedicated web portal.

The epidemiology of mosquito-borne diseases is changing. This is a fact. Diseases that were mostly ‘confined’ to tropical regions are now becoming real threats for temperate countries – for instance, the chikungunya outbreak in Northern Italy in 2007, the chikungunya epidemic in the Americas and the Caribbean beginning in late 2013, the major Zika epidemic in 2015, which also led to local transmission in the US, and the recent surge of yellow fever cases in previously unaffected areas of Brazil. In this chapter, we propose a mathematical framework to emulate the dynamics of the spreading of a mosquito-borne disease in an urban environment. The main innovation of the proposed modelling framework is to improve on the current compartmental epidemiological models by considering not only vector-to-human transmission at fixed favourite cells, but also the probability of transmission along mobility pathways. This modus operandi allow us to improve the understanding of the interplay between human mobility and mosquito-borne disease in urban environments.

The conceptualisation of urban systems is a crucial step in their assessment. It not only involves identifying the constituent parts of an urban system, but also directly influences the definition of appropriate measurement tools, evaluation criteria, and stakeholders for the assessment. Choices related to conceptualisation therefore have strong normative implications. Hence, there is a need to develop ways to analyse and compare different approaches in terms of their relative emphases, strengths, and weaknesses. The purpose of this chapter is to respond to this need by developing analytical tools that build on four contrasting metaphors commonly used for describing cities. The set of four metaphors (machine, organism, network, and melting pot) used for this purpose were selected based their ability to capture different existing scientific perspectives on cities. Through elaborating the implications that each of the four metaphors carries for the different aspects of an urban system, our work produced two frameworks, one for analysing approaches to conceptualising urban systems in general, and another directed more specifically at analysing approaches to the assessment of urban systems. In addition to their analytical functions, these frameworks can also provide the language that enables communication between different scientific approaches to urban systems.

The chapter focuses on the housing sector as an important component of urban systems. It advances a broader understanding of the interplay between the material system (material and energy resources used in housing systems) and the social system (social norms, traditions) as a part of an integrative sustainability assessment of housing. To guide our analysis, we adopt different methodological approaches, which allow us to couple the material management goals derived from the analysis of the material system with the social options and constraints that affect whether these goals are achieved. This takes place, more specifically, in the context of shrinking housing size. We propose a set of indicators for assessing the housing system. Additionally, we display their interrelations, and the roles they play within the system: we identify the indicators that drive or monitor the performance of the housing system and subsystems, and the actors, life-cycle stages, and material management goals that these address. Finally, we propose to use this approach for analysing and assessing the current state of the housing system, but also for governing it and addressing the need for shrinking housing’s environmental footprint.

This chapter presents a comparative analysis of four Participatory Multi-Criteria Approaches (PMCAs) usually applied in sustainability assessments (SMCE, MCM, 3-SPM, and INTEGRAAL). Such approaches are presented in detail and subsequently compared to each other according to three elementary yet crucial questions: who assesses?; what is assessed?; and how is it assessed? The results outline potential synergies and theoretical incompatibilities between the four approaches. The analysis also supports future PMCA applications when choosing one particular approach according to: key meta-principles (i.e., epistemological stance, methodological emphasis); logistical constraints (e.g., time, budget); local idiosyncrasies (e.g., pertinent geographical scales, power asymmetries); and organisational factors.

The participation of societal actors has been advanced as the gold standard of sustainability assessment processes and is thought essential to dealing with the plurality of normative claims surrounding sustainability and the need to take decisions in a context of trade-offs. However, participation per se does not guarantee these outcomes. In this chapter, we put the spotlight on the politics of participatory sustainability assessments and look at the entanglements of knowledge and power in such processes. First, we introduce different conceptualisations of participation and show that participation is a contested concept that goes beyond methodological questions. Second, to equip ourselves for a discussion of the politics of participatory sustainability assessments, we present an analytical framework for studying diverse facets of power (‘power over’, ‘power to’, and ‘power with’) throughout participatory sustainability assessment processes. By means of a literature analysis, we illustrate how, depending on the design of the process and the socio-political context in which it takes place, different power relations pervade and shape participation processes and their outcomes. The analytical framework presented can support reflexivity in tackling power dynamics in participatory sustainability assessments.

Global un-sustainability is shaped by a form of urbanisation that has created urban systems with disproportionate natural-resource consumption. This results in severe damage to the global ecosphere. The causal mechanisms of this relationship can be related to Castell’s ‘dominance of the space of flows’ or expressed in terms of World City Networks. Critical to sustainable transformation are material-resource and energy-network flows, understood as teleconnections between urban sinks and planetary sources. So far, there is no interpretation of this nested global urban-industrial network and its correlated impacts that builds links to a sustainability transformation strategy. Concepts such as global commodity chains (GCC) offer valuable impetus, as they address research on material and product flows in globalised urban-industrial finance, information, and service networks. However, to achieve levels of sustainability transformation, a perspective that goes beyond an analytical and descriptive lens is necessary with regard to the design of sustainable supply chains. Moreover, qualitative extensions of Sustainable Supply-Chain Management (SSCM) in the understanding of ecological economics provide possibilities for solutions. In order to pave the way for this further, this chapter provides an outline of a multi-domain framework for sustainable urban-industrial supply systems based on strong sustainability and nested systems organisation theory.

Any sustainability assessment uses some notion of sustainability as a reference. It is increasingly acknowledged that sustainability is a contested concept and that its different definitions are rooted in different values. Accordingly, researchers have started to develop approaches for producing knowledge in a context of diverging values. However, little attention has been paid to these values and to how they play into sustainability assessments. In this chapter, we address this question in three parts. First, we show how different ethical positions and worldviews enter notions of sustainability and shape the solution spaces for sustainability issues which are taken into consideration. Secondly, we present different stances on how the scientific method should address the presence of values and show how they can be traced back to different values about what good science is. Thirdly, we show that values are historically constructed and shaped by the socioeconomic, socio-technological, and socio-ecological order and at the same time contribute to reproducing it. We also show that this process risks leading to a prevalence of notions of sustainability that reproduce the very dynamics at the origin of the sustainability problem at hand. We conclude the chapter with recommendations for how this challenge could be overcome.

This chapter provides an integrative view of the sustainability challenges of urban systems. Thereby, urban metabolism is explored as a promising framework which is often praised as offering a systemic understanding of sustainability challenges in different areas. Nevertheless, this framework still has several shortcomings. To overcome these limitations and to better understand what the urban characteristics are that make cities (un)sustainable and contribute to global (un)sustainability, we take a historical perspective. This is combined with additional pieces of evidence into a general and systemic metabolic view of the effects of urbanisation on social, environmental, and economic sustainability. The chapter concludes by proposing an integrative and transdisciplinary framework to cover the multiple facets of urban sustainability both in terms of spatial scales and from a disciplinary point of view.