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Urban sustainability assessment through spatial lenses: turning the spotlight on the local neighbourhood unit

Melissa Pang

With global environmental change and quality of life issues at the forefront of international discussions today, urban development strategies and policies are often framed around various sustainability or liveability goals. Regardless of the sustainability assessment (SA) tool used to evaluate performance and track progress, the spatial heterogeneity of urban system characteristics should be accounted for, given that distinct neighbourhoods exist as a result of specific local features. In the same way, sustainability can also be expected to be spatially expressed across the urban system as a reflection of the local environment. However, urban SA performed in research and practice today often adopt a passive approach, if any, to incorporate spatially explicit approaches. Scholars have also called for more work to be done to better understand the impact of neighbourhood effects on urban sustainability and liveability. This thesis examines urban sustainability and SA through two spatial lenses (spatial scale and spatial boundary) to investigate the relevance and role of local urban form and the neighbourhood unit in the assessment of urban sustainability. The canton of Geneva, Switzerland (GE) is used as the empirical case study here. First, secondary data describing various aspects of Geneva's built environment was to establish a typology of local urban form via cluster analysis. This typology and other neighbourhood design criteria were then used to define functional neighbourhood units across GE. Using a set of off-the-shelf urban SA indicators, the physical sustainability (relating to the built environment) of these functional neighbourhoods was evaluated and compared across spatial scales. Next, the functional neighbourhood boundaries were compared with perceived neighbourhood boundaries drawn by Geneva residents. These perceived boundaries were collected through a spatially explicit online survey which also gathered data on neighbourhood satisfaction across various themes that was subsequently used to assess social sustainability across the same set of functional neighbourhoods. Two indicators describing the extent of the overlap between functional and perceived neighbourhoods were established and used to characterise the relationship between the two boundary definitions. For both the physical and social dimensions, statistical analyses were conducted to investigate the relationship between local urban form and sustainability. Lastly, as an extension to the core findings of this thesis and the Geneva case study, an exploratory analysis of urban sustainability tradeoffs at the neighbourhood scale was carried out. To sum up, thesis scrutinises the role of intra-urban system spatial heterogeneity in shaping urban dynamics, specifically in relation to the built environment and urban sustainability. The relevance of the local neighbourhood unit to urban sustainability and SA are analysed from different perspectives; and methodological recommendations for urban SA as a tool to support decision-making and foster sustainable urban development are presented.

EPFL2023

Explore, engage, empower: methodological insights into a transformative mixed methods study tackling the COVID-19 lockdown

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Garance Clément, Laurie Daffe, Livia Bianca Fritz, Daniel Gatica-Perez, Vincent Kaufmann, Anna Pagani, Melissa Pang, Ulrike Vilsmaier

Action-oriented, transformative, and transdisciplinary approaches are increasingly heralded as promising tools that enable researchers not only to produce new knowledge about a situation, but also to actively engage in tackling it; however, such approaches raise critical questions about the methodological implications and conflicts involved in pursuing multiple objectives concurrently. This article seeks to advance this debate by examining the methodological implications of pursuing both knowledge production-oriented (epistemic) and action-oriented (transformative) objectives in urgent and uncertain situations. It asks how far a transformative mixed methods research design can leverage the potential of research to achieve multiple objectives in times of crisis. This methodological inquiry is based on a transformative mixed methods study on housing conditions and well-being which was initiated during the first COVID-19 lockdown in Switzerland. The study was composed of a country-wide survey, mobile crowdsourcing, interviews and Citizen Think Tanks. The results of this methodological reflection illustrate how this research design made it possible to (i) explore the effects of the crisis on domestic living spaces, (ii) engage with the crisis in a joint research space, and (iii) stimulate empowerment through reflection and mutual learning. These insights suggest the multidimensional orientation of the transformative mixed methods approach is appropriate for acting upon urgent crises. However, it challenges core methodological values and research constellations including (i) tackling unequal engagement opportunities, (ii) navigating social and epistemic control, and (iii) paying attention to situatedness and positionality. The article concludes that, in anticipation of future crises, favorable conditions for multi-targeted, collaborative research need to be fostered, both on the institutional and on personal levels. These conditions should enable fast and adequate team formation, as well as reflection and negotiation of positionalities, and divergent interests and objectives, of both scientists and citizens.

2022

Urban sustainability assessment in Geneva: Relevance of the local neighbourhood unit

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, François Golay, Melissa Pang

The physical characteristics of an urban system are typically heterogeneously expressed, creating distinct neighbourhoods shaped by specific local features. Hence, spatially explicit expression of sustainability across the urban system is expected and should not be ignored. In this paper, we present an empirical study that explicitly accounts for the spatial heterogeneity of local-scale urban form features and the significance of a neighbourhood in the canton of Geneva, Switzerland. Our work first established a typology of urban form features, followed by the definition of local-scale functional neighbourhood boundaries using well-established criteria across the study area. An assessment of the sustainability of the resulting neighbourhoods revealed that significant differences can be observed between the different neighbourhood types across various components of urban sustainability. These results highlight the relevance, and argue for the importance, of incorporating local-scale approaches for more effective urban sustainability assessment to support urban planning and policymaking in the transition towards sustainability.

Sage2022