Urban sustainable mobility and citizens quality of life

Abstract

The research reported in this communication intends to show that sustainable cities are entitled toprovide higher life quality levels to their populations. In a world more and more impacted by theconsequences of anthropogenic activities (namely climate change and pollution), it is outstandingthat public organizations are endowed with funds and vested with the appropriate means to assesstheir consequences on citizensŽ life quality, so that they can trigger improvements in environmental conditions in sustainable ways.The current research - developed in the Territorial Planning and Environmental division of theFaculty of Engineering of Porto University (Portugal) - characterizes the concept of "sustainableurban mobility", as found on the relations among sustainability, urban life quality and publictransports.A deep revision is carried out not only in terms of bibliographical framework but also through asurvey on Portuguese and European UnionŽs documents that emphasize the main goals and strategic orientations to achieve urban sustainability in what particularly involve mobility issues.This research seeks to develop a set of instruments specially designed to monitor the evolution ofthe sustainable urban development. These instruments are grouped on three main domains: environment, economic, and social. A computational user-friendly methodology is presented to compute this set of indicators, based on feasible and comparable data that leads to objective and clearresults. This methodology is applied, as a case study, to the Porto city (Portugal) that has recentlyattained high levels of sustainable development. Public planning policies and private initiativesare analysed, and related to the proposed set of indicators, in order to consolidate an overall methodology for the assessment of sustainable urban development, generally applicable to other urbanrealities.A discussion is pursued on the topicality and urgency of these kind of methodologies and instruments in urban policy definition and implementation, as its application will enable the assessmentof urban mobility, as well as the definition of concrete policies aimed at urban sustainability, thuspromoting citizensŽ quality of life.