The quality of life in Padova Municipality and the ISO 14031 model. An experience to measuring urban sustainability by context indicators and performance indicators

The paper concerns the sustainability measurement in local context. The aim of the research is to define and to test tools and methodologies to measure efficiently the city’s quality life. From the literature analysis it seams that the adopted indicators are generally unfitted to measure the urban sustainability. The reasons are: • Well-known difficulty to analyse complex and interconnected aspects related to sustainability and quality of life, • Clear lack of tools and methods to communicate to the people the results of analyses an then the subsequent difficulty to share information and decisions, • Generally the measurement’s operations are quite separated from the decision making processes. The contributions of this research proposal can be synthesized as below: i. To identify and to apply tools of description and synthesis thanks to: - disaggregated measures to favourite the learning and the analysis, - aggregated measures to facilitate the communication and the sharing. ii. To define an evaluation’s methodology coherently with the Local Agenda 21 process, using indicators able to guarantee: - a continuous monitoring of the Quality of Life related to relevant and objective topics, - a specific assessment of the local priorities management actions which are connected to the Local Action Plan.