Avaliação integrativa de sustentabilidade urbana: uma proposta de estrutura conceitual

Abstract

In the context of the goals for sustainability, the urban environment is of great relevance. It is where most of the world’s population lives, and the most significant impacts are generated. As a social and economic territorial construction, the city results from the dynamic interaction between natural, social, and built capital, with flows of people, materials, and energy produced within its scope and originating from other territories to maintain its production and consumption patterns. For this reason, it requires a system of governance and public management, increasingly based on consolidated information instruments, including the integrative assessment of urban sustainability, which is the focus of this thesis. The aim was to propose a conceptual framework for the integrative assessment of urban sustainability by selecting and identifying structuring elements. This is a purposeful research with the objective of application based on documentary and bibliographic data. As a result, a framework was developed that integrates several structuring elements to be considered in urban sustainability assessments, aiming to contribute to formulating public policies. The structure developed, based on the state of the art of the subject, includes the following elements: vision; sustainability principles; values; planetary boundaries; natural, social, and built capital; spatial scales or contexts (local, regional, state, national, and global); resource flows inspired by urban metabolism (input and output flows); environment, systems and subsystems; environmental variables; available sustainability indicators/indexes; monitoring variables and factors generating instability. As it is an open and flexible conceptual framework proposal, it allows for the free configuration of several elements, including the definition of key sustainability issues and leverage points, to enable the definition of priorities and the identification of opportunities for improvements.