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Proquest searches of newspaper hits provide a proxy for interest (in terms of volume and dynamically in terms of the content of this interest) in urban sustainability. Thus, the more references, the larger relative interest or concentration in the topic or version/vision of sustainability. Different combinations of terms under this sustainability umbrella may indicate different conceptualizations of sustainability in different places. Conceptually, this can be thought of as organized in four disparate categories.
• First, the built environment aspects include terms such as vacancy, urban agriculture, and urban greening, green building.
• Second, environmental aspects include terms such as air quality and water quality.
• Third, economic aspects include terms such as sustainable business, green jobs, buy local, and green certification.
• Forth, overarching conceptual issues include terms such as sustainability, climate change, environmental justice, and revitalization
In order to measure this, I imputed each search term into Proquest. The sample consisted of the 55 largest cities based upon population. Washington D.C. was excluded from the sample as there was no way to distinguish the city separately from conversations meant to reference national-level discussions. Although this limitation should also be considered in cases where cities are also state capitals, such cities were nonetheless included in the sample below as the impact is less extreme. In each case, the search term plus each city was added. Thus, in the search field I entered “search term” + “city.” This was done, for example, instead of changing the geographic scope in Proquest. This is because the desired measured impact would then be where the source is coming from—rather than enabling us to measure the “nature” of the discussion. Reference types were limited to newspapers. Temporally, data was recorded for two periods. First, data was collected for all years total. The date range was recorded, thus, indicating when the term originated. Second, data was collected on the last 5 years. (2009) This provides a measure of recent discussion of sustainability terms.
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Nijaki, L. Future directions: moving from urban sustainability’s three “E”s to three “I”s. J Environ Stud Sci 7, 160–165 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-014-0214-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-014-0214-8