DEFINING AND MEASURING METRO REGIONS FOR INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS

Monica Brezzi, OECD

IAOS/SCORUS ConferenceSantiago, Chile 20 October 2010

Sustainable economic development of cities and regions – issues in

indicators• Translate policy objectives into

outcome indicators and follow progress (Chile)

• Coordination with national policies and frameworks (Brazil and Finland)

• (poor) availability of data at detail level (all)

• (poor) availability of observations over time (all)

Cross-country comparison of urban sustainability: 3 more issues

• What is the “city”? (lack of agreed definition)

• What are the meaningful indicators? • Who can produce the indicators?

Trade off between defining and measuring: TL3 regions as building blocks for the metro functional area (not very accurate), but SOME data are available for TL3 regions

OECD Metropolitan database: 90 large metro regions used for Reviews of Urban

Policies

Currently investing in improving the definition of metro boundaries

Rationale for indicators

Lack of appropriate data for worldwide comparison of functionally defined metropolitan regions

Internationally comparable indicators can be used by metropolitan authorities and national policy makers (responsible for resource allocation)

Policy framework for indicators is usually goal-based. Indicators are used for policy strategy development, monitoring of outcomes , strategy reformulation

A focus on environmental indicators, the less developed ones

Core environmental indicators Supplemental indicatorsPercentage of land for agricultural use Percentage of city’s solid waste that is

recycledTotal hectares of green areas Number of personal automobiles per capita

Total residential electrical use per capita Proportion of buses running on clean fuel

Proportion of commuters to total employees Surface of restored brownfields

Share of employment outside the 10-mile circle from the metro area center point

Share of renewable energy in energy consumption

Sprawl index (based on ratios of population in high density and low density census tracts)

Water consumption per capita

Proportion of commuters using public transport Share of wastewater treated

Density (km) of public transport network

Air pollution

Co2 Emissions (definition to be agreed on)

Average temperaturePatents in green technologies

Access to data

Working at a low geographic level makes access to data more problematic

Register data are a great resource with too great access restrictions

Wider use of GIS/geo-referenced sources is key, especially for environmental indicators

Easier access to data and geographical layers by National Institutions (NSO, Research Centers) needed