АНАЛІЗ НАУКОВО-МЕТОДИЧНИХ ПІДХОДІВ ДО ОЦІНЮВАННЯ СТАЛОСТІ ІНФРАСТРУКТУРИ МІСТА

Abstract

Urban infrastructure sustainability assessment currently is being viewed as an important step towards the reduction of urbanization consequences, at the same time improving sustainability of communities within economic, social and ecological changes. To make such informed decisions, scientists have already developed several tools for comprehensive assessment of cities’ sustainability, which unfortunately do not fully reflect the sustainability of their infrastructures. Most modern assessment methods have been developed based on the needs of developed countries, which differ from the needs of developing countries. Increasingly, cities in developed countries obtain the top positions in various international rankings for urban sustainability. At the same time, cities in developing countries are rarely included in the rankings. Despite the presence of a significant number of scientific papers on the topic of urban sustainability assessment, the methodology for assessing the sustainability of its infrastructure remains unestablished. Most scholars consider urban infrastructure to be an integral part of sustainability assessment. According to the author, this approach is ineffective in terms of the results obtained, as it does not provide an opportunity to objectively analyze the state of municipal infrastructure due to the small number of criteria used for direct evaluation. This approach also limits the possibility of comparison between the infrastructures of different cities. Therefore, there is a need for further research and development of a specialized methodology for urban infrastructure sustainability assessment. Within the scope of this work, author analyzed various methods used for urban infrastructure sustainability assessment, presenting their advantages and disadvantages as well as analyzed the wholeness of the main urban sustainability indicators used for urban infrastructure assessment. It was revealed that out of 9 indicators analyzed only 3 proved to be adequate based on the number of infrastructure components included into assessment methodologies and availability of assessment results for several consequent years.