Abstract
The onset of the 21st century realized the necessity to assess the sustainability of urban neighborhoods in developed countries and consequently led to the emergence of neighborhood sustainability assessment (NSA) for encouraging the sustainable development of cities. Sustainable Development Goals 11 (SDG11) has asserted that by 2050, two-thirds of the World’s human population will be urban.
Moreover, all the existing sustainability assessment tools in India, such as the LEED India, GRIHA, IGBC Green Township rating system, cover mainly environmental criteria and are based on the precedents of the developed countries. This study has established the need for a tailor-made comprehensive sustainability assessment framework at neighborhood-level urban communities (NLUCs) for Indian megacities addressing the missing dimensions and context-specific issues. The study has devised a novel systematic literature review methodology, conducting content analysis employing unsupervised Rapid Automatic Keyword Extraction (RAKE) algorithm to automatically extract keywords from urban sustainability literature, eliminating manual errors. It has developed an automated binary classifier for labeling articles which have helped in identifying existing, missing, and neglected dimensions of sustainability. The findings led to developing a holistic, interconnected sustainability dimension model named Pentagram Sustainability Model encompassing Environment, Social, Economic, Cultural, and Institutional dimensions for assessing the sustainability of NLUCs.
A comparative analysis of existing NSA tools identified limited consideration of socio-economic dimension and context specificities especially the cultural aspects in the existing NSA tools. This reduces the applicability of NSA tools for encouraging neighborhood sustainability especially in cities of developing countries of the Global South like India with entrenching socio-economic inequities and socio-cultural transformations due to rapid urbanization. The study contributes to conceiving innovative interdisciplinary methodologies in the field of NSA. A list of 26 indicators has been proposed employing Delphi and variable selection and regularization methods. Indicators, Sustainability awareness, and quality education, Safety and security, Location preference, Conservation of cultural assets, Existence and range of local cultural policy are the five most important indicators for predicting ESC sustainability. This framework of indicators has been used for structuring a Bayesian Network (BN) model in evaluating the ESC sustainability of NLUCs. The study has also analyzed the extent to which the targets of the SDG11 have been addressed in the present indicator set. The indicator set has addressed research gaps in the existing approaches of urban sustainability especially concerning gender issues and governance through the inclusion of indicators Avoid development of inappropriate site, Encouraging women empowerment, Support for vulnerable groups, Existence and range of local authority cultural policy.
The study has adopted the approach of BN modeling to address the lack of incorporation of the interlinkage issue and uncertainty considering the intrinsic complexities of dimensions in the existing NSA tools. A three-tier top-down BN model has been developed with three sub-models constituting 30 nodes concerning the Economic, Social, and Cultural dimensions. The model has been tested using 550 sets of real-world survey data, with the prediction error rate being never higher than 5% for the three sub-models and is 2% for the query node. The study has also conducted a qualitative content analysis of the NLUC feedback to evaluate the ESC scores of the BN model. The social sub-model has the most significant contribution towards achieving ESC sustainability, followed by Economic and Cultural sub- models. The study has appraised the ESC scores with the psychographic segmentation analysis of the target population to gauge the level of sustainability concern of the existing target residents of the NLUCs to provide a base for policymakers for devising sustainability strategies. A strong connection has been found between residents practicing recycling and those involved in the neighborhood or socially responsible activities with higher degrees of sustainability consciousness since these activities are linked with pro-environmental behavior. The proposed assessment methodology will be beneficial to the local government to assess the ESC sustainability of NLUCs to implement appropriate decisions and enhance the economic, social, and cultural aspects of the NLUCs.
Keywords: sustainability dimensions, neighborhood sustainability assessment, indicators, Bayesian network, sustainability- consciousness
