With the share of the global population living in cities steadily increasing, more and more attention is directed to the development and design of these urban systems. Moreover, with quality of life and global environmental change issues at the forefront of international discussions today, sustainable development concepts feature prominently in urban planning strategies around the world. Yet, translating these strategies to concrete outcomes requires tools that can adequately measure and evaluate urban systems – and their progress – with regard to various sustainability goals.

In such sustainability assessment (SA) tools, space and scale are important notions that should be explicitly considered. For any urban system, its physical, environmental, and social characteristics tend to be heterogeneously expressed across space. This spatial heterogeneity of urban variables creates distinct urban sub-systems (e.g. neighborhoods) across different spatial scales that are shaped by specific local contexts and environments. In the same way, measured outcomes such as urban sustainability are also expected to be spatially expressed across the urban landscape as reflection of the local urban features. Furthermore, the manner in which urban units are defined in space can also influence the results of any SA performed. In spite of this, current research and practice in urban sustainability mostly adopt a passive approach to incorporating spatiality in SA, and the tools to evaluate sustainability are often applied to arbitrary spatial units such as municipalities or ZIP code areas without any deeper consideration of their form or function.

With Geneva as a case study, the main goal of this project is to examine urban sustainability through spatially explicit lenses and consider the notions of space and scale – and their implications – for urban SA and beyond. The following research questions will be addressed:

• Is the local scale relevant for urban SA in Geneva?
• How can – or should – local neighborhood units be defined for urban SA?
• What is the impact of different boundary definitions for urban SA and further research?
• To what extent can measured outcomes like sustainability and liveability be modelled using urban variables at the local scale in Geneva?

In this project, a set of local scale functional neighborhoods are first conceptualized and established using secondary data via a spatially explicit typology-based approach. A web-based geosurvey is conducted to collect data on neighborhood satisfaction and perceived liveability, providing a more subjective look at the social dimension of urban sustainability in Geneva. Finally, in addition to empirically demonstrating the importance of local scale approaches for urban SA, the results from the various analyses conducted in this project shed light on the challenges faced when operationalizing the various dimensions of sustainability in urban SA, as well as identify the trade-offs in sustainability that can help inform planning strategies and shape further research.

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