Introduction
Cities are civilization’s main stage. More than half the world’s people now live in urban areas, and, like never before, cities are the arenas for addressing the most pressing environmental problems and tackling challenges of sustainable development. Now, cities’ climate change and decarbonization efforts are taking center stage, with the 2023 announcement of a Coalition for High Ambition Multi-level Partnerships for Climate Action (CHAMP) that will include cities and regions directly into federal climate planning strategies and processes. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading authority on climate change science, is further convening a Special Report on Cities and Climate Change. To guide cities in these efforts, strong scientific evidence is needed to shed light on where cities stand with respect to key environment and sustainability challenges, such as air pollution, urban heat, and green space.
While various groups and indices have delved into urban sustainability, their efforts have been confined to specific sectors, regions, and limited in their breadth. Until the launch of the Urban Environment and Social Inclusion Index (UESI) in 2018, there was a notable absence of a tool or initiative dedicated to bridging these gaps. The UESI has successfully orchestrated collaborative efforts among cities to foster sustainable development, serving as a central hub for aggregating data and distilling insights from diverse urban sustainability initiatives worldwide. Moreover, the UESI has effectively addressed shortcomings in environmental equity assessments by scrutinizing the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens across communities, ensuring a more comprehensive evaluation of urban environmental performance and inclusivity on a global scale.
Measuring the urban environment in a manner that is both accurate and meaningful to city-dwellers is very challenging. And assessing the relative successes and failures of urban environmental policy is even more difficult. In most urban areas, policies lag behind environmental hazards as cities’ dynamism outpaces governments’ capacity to manage them. Cities are in continuous flux -- those in the developing world have expanded at such a breakneck pace in recent decades that their growth has been difficult to manage and their environmental change tough to measure. We observe this phenomenon even in centrally planned cities like Beijing, where rapid industrial and urban growth has led to extreme levels of air pollution. The Chinese government has vowed to clean up the air, pledging blue skies over Beijing within a decade, yet pollution in the country’s second-tier cities is worsening, following a similar trajectory to Beijing’s. Polluted air reduces global life expectancy by an average of 1.8 years.1 Cities all over the world, from Indianapolis to Cairo, face similar challenges: more than 99 percent of people living in urban areas that monitor air pollution are exposed to air quality levels that exceed World Health Organization limits.2
Sustainable Development Goal 11 and Inclusive Urban Communities
To address environmental sustainability challenges in cities, Sustainable Development Goal 11 (SDG 11) establishes a goal for urban areas to be both sustainable and inclusive. Three out of the 10 indicators for SDG Goal 11 feature provisions to “ensure” or “provide” access (Indicators 11.1, 11.2, 11.7; see Table 1) to environmental goods and services, including basic housing, sustainable transport, and urban green spaces, “in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities” (Indicator 11.7); or to “substantially increase” cities’ policies towards inclusive development” or, more generally, “inclusion” (Indicator 11.3 and 11.b).
As with the terminology describing “sustainable cities,” “environmental justice” and “environmental equity” are conceptual hot buttons of debate. Environmental equity is often assessed both through the experience of environmental harms (e.g., exposure to pollutants) and access to environmental benefits (e.g., urban green spaces) that support a higher quality of life.3 Most assessments of environmental equity strive to capture levels of fairness as the notion arises in environmental management and describe how environmental management can foster and protect fairness for individuals. They fail to evaluate, however, questions such as which communities gain from improved environmental benefits and which are disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards.4 5Few research efforts also attempt to quantify the ways sustainability assessments measure equity or the ways in which environmental disparities disproportionately affect some populations over others.6
Box 1. Environmentally-related Targets and Indicators for SDG-11
| Target | Indicator |
| 11.1 By 2030, ensure access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services and upgrade slums | 11.1.1 Proportion of urban population living in slums, informal settlements or inadequate housing |
| 11.2 By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons | 11.2.1 Proportion of population that has convenient access to public transport, by sex, age and persons with disabilities |
| 11.3 By 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries | 11.3.1 Ratio of land consumption rate to population growth rate. 11.3.2 Proportion of cities with a direct participation structure of civil society in urban planning and management that operate regularly and democratically |
| 11.7 By 2030, provide universal access to safe, inclusive and accessible, green and public spaces, in particular for women and children, older persons and persons with disabilities | 11.7.1 Average share of the built-up area of cities that is open space for public use for all, by sex, age and persons with disabilities |
Table 1. Targets and Indicators for SDG-11 related to environmental goals evaluated in the UESI. Source: UN Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform.7
Towards Measuring Social Inclusion
The difficulty of defining and assessing the equity considerations of urban sustainability helps explain the shortcomings in existing urban sustainability indicator systems and research. What does equity mean for urban inhabitants who are all confronting severe air pollution, even if that pollution is evenly distributed among residents? Does equity entail redistributing access to environmental goods and amenities from wealthier populations to those with lower incomes? In setting a goal for sustainable and inclusive communities, SDG-11 falls short of defining what is meant by these complex, context-specific terms of inclusivity and community.
We therefore define social inclusion as the process of ensuring all members of society have both representation and agency in shaping the decisions that determine their social, political, economic, and cultural lives. Social inclusion can enhance and may reflect the strength of social connectedness, the degree to which individuals and communities are working together to overcome isolation and to foster belonging and solidarity. This definition draws on discussions of inclusive and sustainable development,8 9 distributive justice,10 11 12 social exclusion, 13 14 15well-being,16 and social cohesion.17 18 19 In this context, social inclusion means more than having a seat at the table - it encompasses facilitating inclusion by removing obstacles to participation20 21and ensuring that representation in these decision-making forums has real weight.
There are clear links between social inclusion and the urban environment. Mounting evidence shows that environmental health is increasingly viewed as a commodity for urban citizens who can afford it, a paradigm that leads to environmental injustices and exclusion.22 Studies in political ecology, environmental planning, and gentrification have shown that social exclusion undermines environmental goals and erodes a city’s ability to provide for its citizens, combat climate change, and compete in the global economy.23 24Cities are inherently social places and the success of urban governance needs to be gauged according to the needs of city residents.
A New Approach to Understanding Social Inclusion and the Urban Environment
To better understand the links between the urban environment and social inclusion, it is our aim to institute a data-driven approach. Robust metrics allow cities to identify urban sustainability priorities, set goals, and benchmark their progress over time. Hurdles to accessing and interpreting data can reduce citizens’ ability to participate in discussions around environmental management. Information is a means of providing people with agency and of removing obstacles to engaging in social, political, economic, and cultural discussions and decision-making. Social inclusion and social connectedness occurs -- and can be measured -- at various and overlapping scales, from households to neighborhoods to entire societies. Monitoring efforts may observe and collect both qualitative and quantitative data as they seek to: (1) create a complete assessment of a neighborhood or city’s demographics (e.g., ensure marginalized populations or neighborhoods are included in the definition of a city’s population); (2) track how representation and agency vary according to these demographics; (3) measure the ways social, economic, and environmental benefits and burdens are distributed across these demographics; and (4) assess levels of resilience and community-driven actions across these demographics.
The UESI is a tool and research project that helps city leaders track progress towards SDG 1 1 -- to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. The UESI provides a spatially-explicit approach to evaluate how different neighborhoods within cities vary in terms of environmental performance and social inclusion. By making neighborhood-level environmental and socio-economic data easily accessible, we hope to increase opportunities for social inclusion by connecting urban residents with information about their environments.
The UESI seeks to empower urban residents, providing tools that enable them to track their neighborhood’s access to environmental benefits and burdens relative to other city districts. An open snapshot of a city’s environmental performance provides a shared starting point and frame of reference for residents and policymakers as they identify environmental management priorities and develop management strategies to meet these goals. The world’s cities are diverse, like its people, and this variety -- in geography, development stage, and governance, among other issues -- creates challenging complexity for standardization efforts. A measure that reports a city’s impact on the marine environment, for instance, would be less applicable to Denver than it would be to New York City. And sustainability initiatives in rapidly expanding cities may be very different from those in urban areas with only modest growth. Yet even disparate cities are able to teach and learn lessons from one another. Lagos, Nigeria could learn from Singapore’s water recycling initiatives; Houston, Texas could learn from Bogota’s bus-rapid transit system. In these interactions, standardized sustainability metrics would give nations and cities a common language to communicate their initiatives’ successes and failures.
The UESI includes nearly 300 cities across a range of geographies and levels of economic development (Figure 1). We include at least one city from each continent, excluding Antarctica, and these selections reflect a range of capital and non-capital cities. In terms of regional distribution, Europe & Central Asia have the highest representation with 83 cities, followed by East Asia & Pacific with 76 cities, and North America with 48 cities. Latin America & the Caribbean contributes 36 cities, while Sub-Saharan Africa adds 22. However, there is much more limited coverage in regions like the Middle East & North Africa and South Asia, with only 5 cities each. The countries with the largest number of cities included are the United States with 43 cities, China with 23, Japan with 18, and Italy with 10. Data availability was the strongest determinant for whether a city was included, particularly within the Global South, where the lack of neighborhood-level income and population data made it difficult to evaluate the full suite of UESI indicators.
Figure 1. Map of the cities included in the UESI.
Box 2. Characteristics of Neighborhoods within UESI Cities
One of the most crucial questions in assessing a city’s performance is the scale of the analysis. There are four key scales when examining urban areas: parcel (data at the census or city block level), neighborhood (groups of parcels), regional (which can defined according to political, economic, or geographic boundaries), and macro systems (defined according to the national, ecosystem, and global factors shaping urban areas). Table 2 below provides examples of these scales.
Although each city defines what a “neighborhood” is differently according to their own standards, the UESI adopts the neighborhood as the primary unit of analysis for several reasons. First, we aim to provide a detailed evaluation of environmental performance and social inclusion in a spatially-explicit way that allows citizens and urban managers to understand how these phenomena vary across a city and affect different populations. Adopting a scale coarser than the neighborhood level (i.e., regional or macro-system) would not provide the resolution to allow for an investigation of this variation. Second, although some cities’ analysis may warrant a scale even finer than the neighborhood scale, not every city in our sample has data at that level (e.g., at the census or block level). We therefore had to strike a balance between granularity and data availability to allow for comparison across cities.
| Scale | Example data |
| Parcel-level | Data at a fine scale, e.g., at the level of census tracts or city block(s). In addition to census-level data (such as information about a parcel’s demographics), data at this scale can include detailed data such as the locations of businesses, geolocated tweets, the location of intersections, and air quality monitors. |
| Neighborhood | Data aggregated or available at resolutions of 1-50 square km. Neighborhood-level data examples includes average income of urban districts, urban tree canopy at 30m resolution, and population density. |
| Regional | Regional data related to the urban system, which could be defined by political boundaries, regional economic systems, contiguously built-up areas, and natural areas such as watersheds and commute sheds. This data can focus on urban agglomeration by itself, or include surrounding rural areas. |
| Macro system | Broader circumstances of urban areas may put pressure on built environment. For example, is the city a port city? Is the city in a desert or a rainforest? Are global labor markets undercutting the manufacturing industry in this city? These questions and others will help contextualize the findings of environmental performance assessment at lower scales. |
Table 2. Examples of various urban scales and examples of data for each particular scale. (Source: Adapted from Sipus, 201725; Buchanan, 2001;26 and Golsby-Smith, 1996.27)
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