Developing and testing the Urban Sustainable Development Goal’s targets and indicators – a five-city study

TLDR

The push to embed a specific urban goal in the UN SDGs faced challenges due to diverse interests and the heterogeneity of urban areas worldwide. To streamline the urban SDG, the study aimed to reduce targets and indicators to essential urban dimensions and to evaluate their applicability. Researchers and local authorities co‑produced a comparative pilot across five diverse cities—Bangalore, Cape Town, Gothenburg, Greater Manchester, and Kisumu—adjusting targets and indicators to local data constraints. The pilot’s reality check supplied critical insights that shaped the final urban SDG before its formal announcement by the UN Secretary‑General in September 2015.

Abstract

The campaign for the inclusion of a specifically urban goal within the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) was challenging. Numerous divergent interests were involved, while urban areas worldwide are also extremely heterogeneous. It was essential to minimize the number of targets and indicators while still capturing critical urban dimensions relevant to human development. It was also essential to test the targets and indicators. This paper reports the findings of a unique comparative pilot project involving co-production between researchers and local authority officials in five diverse secondary and intermediate cities: Bangalore (Bengaluru), India; Cape Town, South Africa; Gothenburg, Sweden; Greater Manchester, United Kingdom; and Kisumu, Kenya. Each city faced problems in providing all the data required, and each also proposed various changes to maximize the local relevance of particular targets and indicators. This reality check provided invaluable inputs to the process of finalizing the urban SDG prior to the formal announcement of the entire SDG set by the UN Secretary-General in late September 2015.