CITIES’ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: REVEALING INTERPROJECT SYNERGIES AND TRADE-OFFS AND MAKING THEM MANAGEABLE

Abstract

The city’s strategy should take into account not only the priorities of increasing investment competitiveness and the improvement of citizens’ well-being, but also the issues of sustainable development. Sustainable development of cities has been the subject of active discussion in recent years. This article proposes four modernized directions for sustainable urban development, which correspond not only to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (particularly SDG 11), but also to the original directives of local authorities. These directions include affordable housing, accessible and sustainable transportation systems, sustainable urbanization, and the environmental impact of cities. We developed a methodology for estimating synergies and trade-offs between and within these directions using correlation network analysis with the causality of the indicators and the lags of years. We tested this methodology by estimating the synergies and tradeoffs in the sustainable development of the thirteen largest cities between 2015 and 2019. The results of the correlation network analysis are offered as a weighted directed network correlation graph. Our findings could be implemented by local authorities in the form of a Gantt chart for the optimal order of sustainable urban developmentthat could be based on the network correlation graph.