Defining sustainable communities: The development of a toolkit for urban policy

Abstract

This paper focuses on the development of a toolkit of indicators to support spatial policy making at the local scale related to the sustainable communities agenda. This approach is based on research done through the FURBS Project (Sustainable Urban Form — Methodological Approach for Portugal), which has the objective of producing monitoring indicators of urban change in different domains and scales. The local perspective was supported by the sustainable communities concept, for its integrated analysis of urban themes and sustainability (such as housing preferences, daily mobility and social equity) developed through five case studies in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. Various studies were conducted on different urban form typologies in order to analyse their relationship with components of sustainable communities. Through this analysis, the FURBS research team is building a toolkit that could provide a common methodological framework for use in different urban contexts, and thus help planners and other professionals intervene in complex urban systems.