The ISO 14031 standard to guide the urban sustainability measurement process: an Italian experience

The international debate on sustainable development policies focuses its intervention programmes on the urban context and, according to the principles of participation and subsidiarity, emphasizes the needs to define suitable indicators in order to represent complex problems in a simple way. However, in literature, common positions that acknowledge effective indicators are not yet available: if the utility in adopting reference descriptions and common indicators selection criteria is well established, the claim to define effective lists of indicators for all urban contexts is effective nowadays. In the experience lead by the Municipality of Padua, the standard ISO 14031, that describes the requirements relevant to the environmental performance assessment, was used as reference. In particular, in Padua, within the Local Agenda 21 urban process, the definition of context and performance indicators has followed up in different ways as long as it has pursued different goals: the context indicators, defined by a top-down process, describe the contingent circumstances in which the Forum operates, whereas performance indicators, defined by a participative process, measure the progress of the Local Action Plan, defined by the Forum, and its effectiveness in the future. The conclusions of the research allow to formulate a reference conceptual model that highlights the typical informative requirements of a Local Agenda 21 urban process, and at the same time, solve them proposing the sustainability evaluation as a continuous process. Thanks to both the context and performance indicators, the proposed process is able to analyse the complexity of the urban problems as well as to support decision-making facilitating the sharing of targets. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.