Auditing cities through circles of sustainability

This chapter reflects on some of the ways in which the auditing of cities might be done otherwise. Achieving sustainable cities we argue begins as the task of reflecting upon the nature of human activity in those places. The aim is to develop practices that can ensure that cities and communities are being recreated to 'meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 8). The renewed emphasis on the importance of the city brings together issues of sustainability, measurement processes, and how cities might be part of an alternative mode of governance across the globe that takes the emphasis away from narrow market or prestige considerations. Our call here turns on three simple precepts. Firstly, auditing systems have the potential for masking the underlying problems and even inadvertently making them worse as cities concentrate on the metrics rather than the intersecting sustainability issues themselves. Secondly, developing an adequate auditing approach entails going back to basics - that is, going back to rethink the very foundations that structure the way in which we attempt to measure issues of sociality. There are no perfect indicators of sustainability, and attempts to gather together good indicators without attending to the issue of their inter-relation are bound to fail. Thirdly, enacting an adequate auditing system entails building a global platform around (existing and newly formed) formal and informal institutions. As such, the following discussion takes as its orienting structure the work being done by the Global Compact Cities Programme in slow collaboration with other governance bodies such as the Global Reporting Initiative and UN Habitat.