A discussion on indicators and criteria for sustainable urban infrastructure development

Abstract

Infrastructure systems are at the core of urban sustainability issues. As population growth in urban centres continues to increase, infrastructure requires both development and rehabilitation. Unsurprisingly, this challenge is more evident in urban centres across the world and Portugal is not exception. To address this issue, the technical proposal of the Portuguese Program of the Policies for Land-Use Planning (PNPOT), and according to the Council of Ministers Resolution of April 27, 2006, considers that in order for Portugal to become an equitable territory in terms of development and well-being, the territorial model and corresponding policies-program should encompass strategic options that amongst other things, define the urban system as the guiding criterion for infrastructure network and public facilities design. The European Council released the Renewed EU Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS) in June 2006, calling for sustainability research efforts that promote and are carried out via inter- and transdisciplinary approaches, with the purpose of bridging the gap between science, policy-making and implementation. As spatial distribution and structure of human activities change, so does the call for increased urbanization and associated negative environmental impacts. Therefore and predictably, a major challenge is the development of practical tools to measure and enhance urban sustainability, particularly those that concern design and management of sustainable infrastructure. Life-cycle and threshold analysis are potentially applicable tools. However, measuring the sustainable development level of a given region remains the result of a careful process of selecting and defining sustainability indicators/criteria. Though several have been proposed for a plethora of case studies, the fact remains that each case requires a specific set of indicators/criteria. Some of these indicators will be presented and explored in the paper presented herein for a case-study area of Portugal, the sub-region of Trás-Os-Montes, a mountainous, sparsely populated and deprived area.