Urban sustainable mobility and citizens quality of life

• Tipo: Artigo em Livro de Atas de Conferência Internacional
• Data: 2016-07-15

Autores

Emília Malcata Rebelo (Autor) FEUP

Ata de Conferência Internacional

Título: Heritage 2016 - 5th International Conference on Heritage and Sustainable Development

Outras Informações

Abstract (EN): The research reported in this communication intends to show that sustainable cities are entitled to provide higher life quality levels to their populations. In a world more and more impacted by the consequences of anthropogenic activities (namely climate change and pollution), it is outstanding that public organizations are endowed with funds and vested with the appropriate means to assess their consequences on citizens´ 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 the Faculty of Engineering of Porto University (Portugal) - characterizes the concept of “sustainable urban mobility”, as found on the relations among sustainability, urban life quality and public transports. A deep revision is carried out not only in terms of bibliographical framework but also through a survey on Portuguese and European Union´s 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 of the 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 clear results. This methodology is applied, as a case study, to the Porto city (Portugal) that has recently attained high levels of sustainable development. Public planning policies and private initiatives are 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 urban realities. 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 assessment of urban mobility, as well as the definition of concrete policies aimed at urban sustainability, thus promoting citizens´ quality of life.

Idioma: Inglês

Tipo (Avaliação Docente): Científica

Nº de páginas: 9