Promoting the Sustainable Development Goals in North American Cities

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-vii

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2. Introduction: Localizing SDGs and Empowering Cities and Communities in North America for Sustainability

   • David B. Abraham, Seema D. Iyer

   Pages 1-5

3. Localizing the SDGs in Baltimore: Challenges and Opportunities of the USA Sustainable Cities Initiative

   • Seema D. Iyer

   Pages 7-19

4. Los Angeles: Measuring Its Ambition to Achieve the SDGs

   • Tony Pipa

   Pages 21-30

5. The Idea of Sustainability to Evaluate Growth and Development in the Houston Region

   • David B. Abraham

   Pages 31-50

6. Making the SDGs Relevant for Cities: Using the Community Capital Tool in British Columbia

   • Maria Spiliotopoulou, Mark Roseland

   Pages 51-66

7. How Local Communities Can Align with United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals: A Santa Cruz County Case Study

   • Susan Brutschy, Jennifer Anderson-Ochoa, James Connery, Donna R. Maurillo

   Pages 67-85

8. Top-Down and Bottom-Up Approaches to the SDG Monitoring Challenge

   • Jessica Espey

   Pages 87-96

9. Data for Good for All: Enabling All Communities to Track Progress Toward SDG Implementation

   • Jennifer Temmer, Stefan Jungcurt

   Pages 97-108

10. Helping the Neighborhood: Creating a Sustainability Indicator of Substandard Housing

    • Luis Estevez

    Pages 109-125

11. How the Youth Social Entrepreneurship (YSE) Model Supports Implementation of SDG #8 to bring Economic Growth and Decent Work in American Cities

    • Peg Thomas, Nancy Jacobs, Jennifer Valorose, Laura Schauben

    Pages 127-145

12. Local SDG Indicators for US Cities and Communities

    • David B. Abraham

    Pages 147-155

13. Correction to: Promoting the Sustainable Development Goals in North American Cities

    • David B. Abraham, Seema D. Iyer

    Pages C1-C1

14. Back Matter

    Pages 157-160

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This volume presents North American best practices and perspectives on developing, managing and monitoring indicators to track development progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in local communities and cities. In 4 main sections, the book presents and frames the many ways in which community indicator programs are either integrating or retooling to integrate the SDGs into their existing frameworks, or how they are developing new programs to track and report progress on the SDGs. This is the first volume that focuses on SDG adoption within the context of North Americans cities and communities, and the unique issues and opportunities prevalent in these settings. The chapters are developed by experienced academics and practitioners of community planning and sustainable development, and will add broad perspective on public policy, organizational management, information management and data visualization. This volume presents a case-study approach to chapters, offering lessons that can be used by three main audiences: 1) teachers and researchers in areas of urban, regional, and environmental planning, urban development, and public policy; 2) professional planners, decision-makers, and urban managers; and 3) sustainability activists and interested groups.

• Holy Grail Indicators
• Sustainable Development Goals
• Community planning
• Urban development
• Sustainable development policy
• National Reporting Platform
• landscape/regional and urban planning
• Environmental Geography

• Department of Kinesiology, Rice University, Houston, USA

  David B. Abraham

• Department of Finance and Economics, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, USA

  Seema D. Iyer

David B. Abraham, PhD is a scholar of Environmental Planning and Policy, specializing in Sustainability Planning and Performance Measurement. His research interests focus on developing sustainability strategies for the enhancement of living places. His research and professional experience includes: Food insecurity planning; Health and well-being impacts from the built environment; Urban forestry sustainability strategies; Resiliency and revitalization community planning; and Community performance metrics. His work has been featured at workshops, keynote agendas and conference proceedings throughout the US and internationally in Ireland, Barbados, Brazil, Canada and Portugal. Dr. Abraham is a Research Scientist and Lecturer with the Houston Sustainability Indicators project at Rice University.  

Seema D. Iyer, PhD oversees the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance at the Jacob France Institute (BNIA-JFI) at the University of Baltimore, which has been dedicated to providing reliable, community-based indicators for Baltimore’s neighborhoods since 2000. BNIA-JFI is the local partner of the Urban Institute's National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership, a network of cities that provide longitudinal data on demographics, housing, crime, education and sustainability. Under her leadership, BNIA-JFI has received several awards for its role in increasing accessibility to indicators for organizations such as the Community Indicators Consortium (2016), Harvard Ash Center (2017) and the Association of Public Data Users (2018). Since 2015, she has been involved in the City of Baltimore’s localization of the SDGs and has advised cities around the world on how they can work with indicator programs to help monitor progress. She is also director of the UB’s undergraduate program in Real Estate and Economic Development. She holds a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from the University of Michigan.