MAKING-CITY Deliverable on City Diagnosis

Written by Cristina de Torre, Carla Rodríguez and Ali Vasallo (CARTIF), D1.2 had been submitted in November 2019. Titled “City Diagnosis: analysis of existing city plans”, this report presents the results of a deeply analysis of the city plans which was the first step to the establishment of an accurate city diagnosis for the deployment of an urban energy transition methodology in line with the City Vision 2050 approach.

Sustainable urban transformation is characterised by multiple factors (technical, socio-economic, environmental, ethical perspectives…), and a number of administrative structures that should address the evaluation of alternative urban planning scenarios or opportunities. This defines a complex decision-making process that includes different stakeholders where several aspects need to be considered simultaneously.

Within MAKING-CITY work, the structure of the City Evaluation Framework is performed under the concept of sustainable development. The definition of this methodology has been a learning process based on the hypotheses about normalisation, weighting and aggregation processes to build indexes per category and per application field, which are where the city indicators are grouped.

The City Diagnosis is a key phase for the deployment of an urban energy transition methodology because by an accurate diagnosis the priority action lines can been identified. A process to analyse the information included in the existing city plans has been established in order to have structured information of the starting point to deploy later the City Vision 2050 for each city.

The work presented in deliverable D1.2 has a twofold scope. On the one hand, a methodology is developed both to calculate a city indexes characterising the cities and reflecting its strengths and weaknesses, and to analyse the existing city plans through the main points and going deeply into the targets. On the other hand, city diagnosis of each of the project cities is carried out, analysing the city characteristics following the previous methodology, reaching city indexes; and the existing city plans, with a view to advance long-term planning.

The methodology for the calculation of the city indexes is based on the calculation of the City Level Indicators. The method is developed through four steps:

  1. Calculation of the indicators values.
  2. Normalisation of the indicators with a method based on European targets and scoring the indicators from 0 to 10, being 0 the worst value and 10 the best one.
  3. Prioritisation of indicators, application fields and categories, in which are grouped the indicators, in order to have the vision of the cities about their needs and priorities in the obtaining of the indexes.
  4. Aggregation of the normalised indicators and the weights from the prioritisation, getting final indexes by categories and application fields for each city.

This obtaining of several city indexes is put in context for the circumstances of each city thanks to the characterisation carried out by each city in each of the aspects for which the indexes are obtained.

The selected plans are mainly focused on energy and mobility topics, regardless of urban strategic planning in most cities.  Although there is a tendency to separate energy topic from spatial planning, there is a direct relationship between them (energy related planning and strategies in the spatial planning), and the lower integration of these issues decreases the capacity to develop low-carbon cities in the long term.

Radar view of an example of the City indexes per category.
Radar view of an example of the City indexes per application field.

Post written by Carla Rodríguez (CARTIF & MAKING-CITY partner).

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