Assessment of Urban Sustainability—The Case of Amman City in Jordan

Abstract

Accelerated urbanization causes an increasing number of city dwellers, insufficient and overburdened infrastructure and services, and negative environmental impacts and climate change impacts. Measuring the city’s progress toward sustainability is essential to support decision-making and policy development. This study aims to establish an assessment and monitoring method of sustainable development goals at the city level, focusing on identifying indicators that are compatible with the city context to update and monitor progress toward sustainability. A review of the literature on sustainability assessment methods and tools is presented. A comprehensive framework for city sustainability assessment and a checklist of indicators. Amman city in Jordan is suggested. A Voluntary Local Review (VLR) report of Amman was presented to the United Nations in 2022. The report reviews Amman’s progress toward achieving the SDGs; however, it lacks clear and a quantitative assessment of the city’s sustainability, particularly SDG 11, which this paper seeks to address. The checklist survey questions were formulated according to the sub-indicators of the UN-Habitat SDG indicator metadata. The checklist was distributed to respondents from the Municipality of Amman and related organizations to the VLR. The respondents evaluated the sub-indicators of Goal 11 and gave performance level scores in three levels: low, average, and optimal. The sum of the indicator values is quantitatively presented in tables. The findings reveal that the indicator values of the city sustainability assessment framework, as applied in this paper, can be adjusted within the characteristics and constraints of the local context in a two-year observation period to provide updated data for decision-makers regarding the current status and future implementation of sustainability agendas.