ABSTRACT: With most of the population living in cities while relying heavily upon resources provided from rural areas, the urban footprint and environmental pressure do not cease to grow, which presents great challenges for achieving sustainable communities and the Sustainable Development goals of the United Nations. Unsustainable urban growth can be seen as both a cause and a consequence of natural resource degradation, social, economic, cultural and educational shortcomings and poor and/or insufficient infrastructure. The complex interrelations amongst such matters contribute to form one of the wicked problems facing socioenvironmental systems around the globe. Any sustainability analysis must encompass such dimensions and capture such interrelations, if it is to achieve realistic results. Sound decision and policy making also depends upon robust data and information, which are usually compiled for indicators, indexes and systems of indicators. In this sense, this paper presents a new conceptual model developed for sustainable development assessments encompassing the natural, social and built capitals, as defined in the well – known Meadows report: ‘Indicators and Information Systems for Sustainable Development’. Content analysis supported by a review of related international literature led to the subdivision of each capital into categories and subcategories, for wich 52 sustainable development attributes were derived. Individual indicators that represent such attributes and their interlinkages can then be compiled to suit data availability and specificities of a given scenario of interest, as part of future integrated sustainable development assessments.
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