Valuation of socio‐economic indicators for progressing urban sustainability under distinctive rubrics

AbstractThe key objective of the study is to collect the factors which play an important role in the city's sustainability and implementation advantages for the development of cities in future. This article develops an urban sustainability assessment framework by giving GIS‐based decision support tools to guide cities toward sustainability. Multicriteria analysis was used as the decision support system and provides an analytical framework for assessing differences in the level of criteria and ranking decision options. It has the capability for assessment of urban sustainability because it brings sustainability criteria from three pillars of sustainability, environmental, social, and economic, which provide an integrated approach for assessment of urban sustainability. The GIS‐based multicriteria analysis serves as a sustainability support system that maps urban sustainability and the underlying environmental, social, and economic conditions. The results from the study show that the four cities ‐ Faisalabad, Lahore, Gujranwala, and Multan ‐ have better economic conditions while only Lahore and Faisalabad showed social progress and the remaining cities showed less suitability. For the environmental index, none of the cities attained high suitability. Lahore, Faisalabad, and Rawalpindi showed better conditions than Gujranwala and Multan. It is demonstrated that Punjab cities have made progress in economic condition and improvement in social condition but have poor environmental condition. In the study, the environmental dimension has indicators which have more impact on the urban sustainability. Environmental degradation is observed in all selected regions and not a single region showed suitability toward its environmental condition and due to this none of the cities gained suitable scores for urban sustainability. Consequently, urban sustainability is a multidimensional and dynamic process that needs regular evaluation and monitoring. Thus, this article contends that the tools help to highlight and emphasize those areas that need guidance in achieving urban sustainability.