An Urban Sustainability Assessment Framework: Supporting Public Deliberation around Sustainability of Specific Contexts

More than 80% of Australians and over half of the world's population now live in cities. Cities are the engines for the sustainable development of Australia, and are of critical importance for the future of the nation. Because the social, economic, ecological and institutional development of a city are increasingly interwoven, city management has become a complex enterprise. Management of complex systems such as cities requires the use of innovative, sophisticated planning approaches that can assist in monitoring current conditions and projecting future developments. It also requires a well-structured participatory process of creating social support by stakeholders for long-term city visions. This study develops an urban sustainability assessment framework and explores its use with practitioners on a real-world case study in Logan City, Queensland. The framework includes four stages, namely scoping; envisioning; experimenting and assessment and includes the use of system condition indicators, dynamic agent-based modelling and multi-criteria assessment. Within Australia, this study is significant as the first attempt to implement the framework to a metropolitan sub-region at a neighbourhood level and one of the first attempts to adapt UrbanSim for Australian planning practice. The study engaged with the proposition that to support the planning of sustainable cities, we need to study cities as interconnected, complex living systems that require a different set of practices from that used to study cities as a collection of parts that behave in predictable ways based on universal laws. An evolving paradigm that aims to meet this challenge, and applied in this study, is the social ecological system (SES) paradigm. A SES is an ecological system that is linked with and affected by one or more social systems (Anderies, 2003). Because SES differ in nature, and operate at various scales in time and space, an integrated systems approach seems to make sense to analyse the complexity of the interrelated problems and developments that today’s cities face. One such approach is integrated sustainability assessment (ISA).