Towards a Sustainable Future of Cities in Europe: An Evaluation of Sustainable City Initiatives Using Multicriteria Decision Support Methods

Concerns about quality of life are not just a pressing phenomenon of modern times. There are records on environmental decay in periods of ancient history, in both urban environments and landscapes, and many medieval cities used to have some sort of environmental regulation (Banister et al, 1999). What has made environmental concerns more pronounced in the second part of the twentieth century, is the large scale occurrence of environmental decay. There is no country or area that is not directly or indirectly suffering from environmental externalities. This quantitative extension of environmental problems has several backgrounds including the increasing number of people and a more internationally interlinked network economy with intensive trade and transport (the ‘ecological footprint’). But there are also qualitative and structural factors that are responsible for the so-called ‘new scarcity’, such as the use of synthetic and nonbiodegradable materials, the shift from local to global environmental change or the transition towards more mobile lifestyles. Against this background the notion of sustainable development has become en vogue (for a broad survey of relevant issues see Van den Bergh, 1996). Space and time play a critical role in this concept, since through these two dimensions, it is possible that environmental externalities are dispersed, either to other areas or to future generations.