Measuring sustainable cities in Russia: critical analysis of key methodologies

Abstract

The paper provides insights on the critical analysis of the current methodologies of the sustainability cities measurement for the present-day Russia. Based on meta-analysis of more than 90 peer-reviewed papers published in Russian and English, we examined both authoring and corporate methodologies such as the SGM methodology for Russian sustainable cities, the environmental rating of Russian cities, and the rating of the environmental governance of the Russian cities, the environmental efficacy index and several authoring methodologies. The analysis showed that most of the calculation methods are based on quantitative (statistical) data, what is their advantage, on the one hand, making their results as objective as possible, but on the other hand, it is a disadvantage, because in connection with the delay in publication of statistics or even its absence, it does not allow the annual dynamics to observe. In addition, the difficulty in choosing the most suitable methodology lies in the significant differences in the development of large, medium and small cities in Russia, and many rating methods are developed exclusively for one of the types of cities. Authors concluded that in spite of the high level of the existing methodologies development, there was a shortage of comprehensive studies carried out in the qualitative-quantitative paradigm that would, in addition to index assessment and mathematical models generation, explain complex causal relationships and processes within a city.