Indicators and Scenarios for Sustainable Development at the Local Level

Abstract

Cities around the world have faced the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic with unprecedented speed, due to our hyper-connected society. As history teaches us, epidemics plague society because of the vulnerabilities generated by humans through their relationships with the environment, with other species and with each other. The recent pandemic is a stark reminder that urbanization has changed the way people and communities live, work, and interact, and it is even more necessary than in the past to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to the development of systemic operational skills that can address complex issues within cities. This work showed how many measures adopted during the emergency have now become part of daily life. The lesson of the pandemic is that people’s health is connected to and dependent on the health of the planet, and cities are at the center of this relationship. The objective of the research starts from the need to identify a selection of post-COVID indicators providing an analysis methodology suitable for the creation of its own final set with the identification of specific key performance indicators (KPIs) of the project, replicable in other urban contexts, on which to base the analysis of the level of local sustainability, especially at the neighborhood scale. The proposed methodological framework is developed in two phases: (1) indicator selection and (2) baseline scenario, set out to investigate the existing correlations between the urban environment and the neighborhood level of cities. On the basis of the assessment of the KPIs, selected on the basis of numerous comparisons with the project's internal and external stakeholders, thanks to the creation of an interactive dashboard with Tableau software, it was possible to analyze the basic scenario of proximity at the neighborhood scale for the City of Turin, highlighting weak points and priority areas on which to act, experimenting with the theme “Inhabiting proximity” as an urban response to the pandemic.