What are urban indicators?
Indicators are signposts that allow you to measure whether a place is becoming more (or less!) liveable. They allow you to monitor whether, over time, the methods you’re using to manage urban amenity are working.
An indicator will often be a goal, a target, a threshhold, or a benchmark against which you can assess change. If you are measuring changes in pedestrian safety in the CBD, for example, your chosen indicator might be ‘an 80% reduction in vehicle-related injuries to pedestrians by July 2003’.
Physical and perceptual indicators
Just as urban amenity can be tangible or intangible, the indicators of urban amenity can be physical or perceptual. Physical indicators measure the changes in tangible urban amenity. Perceptual indicators measure the changes in intangible urban amenity.
Sometimes you’ll need to measure change by using both a physical and a perceptual indicator. Noise is a good example. Noise could be measured by the physical indicator of decibels on a noise meter, and by the perceptual indicator of people’s satisfaction with noise levels.
Developing the right indicators
Many different frameworks are available for developing indicators. The guide A good place to live, work, and play contains one suggested process. Another approach trialled by the Urban Amenity Project is using the PSR (Pressure-State-Response) framework. The PSR framework was developed by the OECD, and has already been used by the Ministry for the Environment in its Environmental Performance Indicators Programme.
PSR framework [Word doc 195kb]
