Knowledge Bank

The Center for Urban and Regional Analysis (CURA) and the Sustainability Institute at Ohio State are developing an urban data observatory for the purpose of benchmarking social, environmental, and economic factors related to sustainability in the central Ohio region. The Sustainable Columbus Observatory (SCO) engages community stakeholders including the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission (MORPC) and Smart Columbus to ensure that the data and indicators reflect community sustainability goals, supporting evidence-based policy and program evaluation. At its core, the SCO will consist of an open data portal with advanced capabilities that will differentiate it from existing data portals. Among these will be a dashboard that charts indicator values derived from the data. The set of indicators will be thoughtfully curated to provide a spatio-temporal measures of the sustainability of the region. A crucial challenge is developing an appropriate indicator set. There are a wide range of published sustainability and smart city indicators. However, there are two challenges in implementing a specific set of indicators for a given region, First, these indicator sets measure different things: sustainability indicators emphasize environmental and social sustainability, neglecting economic sustainability, while smart city indicators emphasize economic and social sustainability while neglecting environmental sustainability. It is essential to integrate sustainability and smart city frameworks so both views are captured in performance measurement and tracking community progress (Ahvenniemi et al. 2017). Second, defining and assessing sustainability for a given region depends on individual and community values and the trade-offs these local stakeholders are willing to make. Therefore it is essential to gather additional input regarding these values and trade-offs from community members (Miller et al. 2013). The purpose of this 60-minute session is to present the SCO framework and the indicators project and to invite feedback from our community partners and audience members. We envision a highly interactive session in which we the first half of the session will consist of a presentation of our initial set of indicators, data sources, and measurement of the specific set of indicators for the Columbus region. This presentation will include the participation of one or more of our key community partners. We will also share an initial version of the survey instrument we are developing to assess stakeholder values and trade-offs among the indicators. The second half of the session will be a structured discussion with the audience to gather feedback.

AUTHOR AFFILIATION: Harvey Miller, professor, Ohio State Center for Urban and Regional Analysis and Department of Geography, miller.81@osu.edu (Corresponding Author); Elena Irwin, professor, Ohio State Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics; Ningchuan Xiao, professor, Ohio State Department of Geography; Adam Porr, GIS research analyst, Ohio State Center for Urban and Regional Analysis; Basar Ozbilen, doctoral student, Ohio State City and Regional Planning