Cities’ Sustainable Development: Revealing Interproject Synergies and Trade-offs and Making Them Manageable

Public Administration Issues. 2023. No. 5. P. 130–146.

Bozhya-Volya A. A., Tretyakova E., Bartov O. B.

The city’s strategy should take into account not only the priorities of increasing the investment competitiveness and the improvement of citizens’ well-being, but also the issues of sustainable development. Cities’ sustainable development has been the topic of an active discussion in recent years. This article proposes four modernized directions for the cities’ sustainable development, which corresponds not only to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (particularly SDG 11), but also to the original directives of local authorities. These directions are affordable housing, accessible and sustainable transportation systems, sustainable urbanization, and the environmental impact of cities. We developed a methodology of an estimation of synergies and trade-offs between and within these directions using the correlation network analysis with the causality of the indicators and the lags of years. We tested this methodology by estimation of the synergies and trade-offs in sustainable development of thirteen largest cities during the period between 2015 and 2019. The results of correlation network analysis are offered as a weighted directed network correlation graph. Our findings could be implemented by local authorities as a Gantt chart of the optimal order of the city’s sustainable development that could be formed based on the network correlation graph.

Keywords: synergy effect, urban transport, government housing policy, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), correlation network analysis