Eveline van Leeuwen, Fabio Tejedor (p), Joppe van Driel

Tatjana Neuhuber

Today, cities play a significant role in the discussion about sustainable development (SD). During the last 50 years, the unstoppable urbanisation process has been accompanied by perceiving cities as places of higher well-being. Elements such as education, health services, jobs, access to essential utility services, urban infrastructure, human connectivity, and innovative economies are positively perceived. However, a negative counterpart is rooted in the consumption of transboundary resources impacting natural ecosystems or the increasing inequality that leads to detrimental human well-being. This ambivalent position of looking at cities leads to locating the discussion within the scope of pursuing cities' sustainable development for current and future generations.
One key aspect relates to how cities transition towards SD and if alternative paradigms such as postgrowth could promote ecological balance, social justice and local resilience. In particular, the role of urban monitoring systems and indicators are key because they facilitate bridging the abstraction of SD with the policy-making process. In this regard, the volume of metrics and indicators is expanding according to an increasing data production and growing ICT technologies, such as AI and big data analytics. Moreover, urban monitoring systems are often developed according to a specific framework, leading to redundancy and fragmentation in the decision-making process. For instance, the operationalisation of SD according to the SDGs, Doughnut Economics (DE), and Broad Prosperity (BP) in Amsterdam present overlapping visions about the city’s SD while simultaneously limiting collaboration and communication across different stakeholders.
This study thus aims to identify key factors that enhance urban monitoring systems to better envision post-growth cities. It does so by conceptually and empirically comparing the SDGs, DE and BP frameworks and their monitoring systems and identifying how the local governments and policymakers can use this knowledge in the policy-making process. We used the city of Amsterdam as a case study.

Tatjana Neuhuber (p), Antonia Schneider, Anna-Theresa Renner

Aleid Brouwer

The built environment shapes how people allocate their time and the types of goods and services they consume. The “x-minute city” concept has recently gained prominence, advocating for cities where essential infrastructure is accessible within a certain distance, supporting both livability and sustainability. When such infrastructure is not nearby, households may need to travel further or rely on private rather than public options (e.g., healthcare or childcare), affecting both their time use (e.g., by longer travels) and household budgets.

This study aims to understand how accessibility to social and transport infrastructure influences household time use and consumption patterns. Two datasets on Austrian households are used, one capturing time-use and the other consumption patterns. Since these public datasets do not cover the same households, a synthetic matched dataset will be created using a statistical matching (machine learning) technique. Infrastructure accessibility will be analyzed with a comprehensive geocoded database of social infrastructure and travel distances via public transport. To examine the effect of social and transport infrastructure on time use and consumption, a Structural Equation Model (SEM) will be applied, as SEM can handle latent variables, measures indirect effects, and accounts for measurement error, making it superior to OLS for capturing complex relationships.

The study’s findings are important for decision-makers, planners, and academics. The results highlight the link between public social infrastructure and household’s well-being in terms of time and consumption, providing evidence for sustainable social provisioning systems. Additionally, the findings have practical implications for planners advancing the “x-minute city” concept within and beyond urban areas. Lastly, the research promotes an approach to understanding public social infrastructure’s role regarding intra- and inter-household resource allocation, emphasizing potential gender dimensions and regional inequalities.

Aleid Brouwer (p)

Fabio Tejedor

In this paper the different ways to measure new dimensions of wellbeing are discussed. In the Netherlands we use ‘the ‘broader prosperity measures’, which can be used as an index, but many institutions also use the set of indicators as individual variables. We will explore the possibilities and will have special attention to the contextual aspect of understanding broader prosperity measures. What does it mean to compare index outcomes over regions when discussion new dimensions of wellbeing? Is there such a thing as an objective level of broader prosperity that should be the aim for the individual regions?