New tools for monitoring urban sustainability - challenges and opportunities for cities in the 2020s

Abstract

This dissertation emphasises the challenges posed by global migration and urban expansion in the 21st century, highlighting their impact on sustainable development in cities. It acknowledges that cities are central to both the manifestation of problems and the development of solutions. This thesis explores the potential of new technical potentials, specifically data-driven approaches and spatial analysis methods, in enhancing the monitoring of urban sustainability. Three primary research foci have been selected as catalysts for sustainable urban development, with each one examined in a specific sub-study: urban growth dynamics, urban mobility structure, and urban arrival spaces. The first sub-study proposes a categorisation of urban growth into four distinct development paths, enabling simplified classification from a sustainability perspective. The second sub-study also emphasizes the importance of monitoring the mobility transition and puts forth a tool to identify and evaluate existing urban mobility structures, by classifying walking, transit and car-dependent neighborhoods. Additionally, the thesis presents a methodology for identifying and typifying arrival spaces, examining the impact of global migration. The thesis explores the integration and combination of various research fields in sustainable urban development, highlighting the potential of cross-thematic analyses through the utilisation of the tools developed in this work. The insights gained from this research highlight the significance of new technologies in analysing and understanding local urban phenomena. The spatial level of analysis is crucial for understanding urban challenges, but obtaining valid and small-scale socio-economic data remains a challenge. However, the increasing availability of open data and open-source platforms supports the development of monitoring tools and their transferability across administrative borders. Overall, this work sees a need for further research into the design and construction of comprehensive monitoring systems that can capture the dynamics of urban development in its entirety.