Urban social sustainability themes and assessment methods

In recent years the social dimension (or ‘social sustainability’) has gained increased recognition as a fundamental component of sustainable development. This paper explores the notion of social sustainability and its main assessment methods, together with the pioneering social sustainability framework devised by the City of Vancouver, Canada. The paper illustrates how there is no consensus on the definition of social sustainability because this concept is currently being approached from diverging study perspectives and discipline-specific criteria, making a generalised definition difficult to achieve. In addition, traditional ‘hard’ social sustainability themes such as employment and poverty alleviation are increasingly being complemented or replaced by emerging ‘soft’ and less measurable concepts such as happiness, social mixing and sense of place. Within this context, the paper looks at how Vancouver's local authorities have approached urban social sustainability and discusses the importance of the selection of sustainability principles, objectives, themes, assessment techniques and indicators from a social perspective.