Measuring U.S. Sustainable Development

Eugenie L. Birch
University of Pennsylvania

Foreign Exchange
Foreign Exchange, a department of Cityscape, reports on what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office for International and Philanthropic Innovation has learned about new departures in housing and development policy in cities and suburbs throughout the world that might have value if applied in U.S. communities. If you have a recent research report or article of fewer than 2,000 words to share in a forthcoming issue of Cityscape, please send a one-paragraph abstract to lawrence.j.handerhan@ hud.gov.

In recent decades, such global institutions as the United Nations (U.N.) have promoted sustainable development, loosely defined as improving the human condition without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. In its advocacy, the U.N. has called for the crafting of measures to benchmark current conditions and mark progress toward the overall goal. As national and subnational governments have undertaken these activities, they have also been involved in developing a wide range of monitoring tools, especially defining indicators reflective of their distinctive programs in this arena. The work of the Partnership for Sustainable Communities (PSC), an alliance between the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, founded in 2009, provides an example of this phenomenon. Working with researchers from the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Urban Research and funded by the Ford Foundation, the PSC has launched the Sustainable Communities Indicator Catalog described in this article.