trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

examination concern e.g. dispersal of urban structure, growing amount of transport, car dependence,fragmentation of green areas, and competition for tax payers between municipalities. To enable thisassessment sustainability criteria and indicators were developed in an inter-disciplinary research projectcalled "Sustainable urban land use and transport" (Seutukeke), running from 2008 to 2011. In thisproject all three pillars of sustainability – ecological, social, and economic – were examined in functionalurban regions, each containing various municipalities. Sustainability in urban regions implies thatgrowth and development will not endanger even in a long run biodiversity and ecosystem services(ecological dimension), well-being of people and social justice (social dimension), and economicprogress (economic dimension).The criteria were designed to be used for setting of objectives, impact assessment, and monitoring ofland use and transport planning in medium sized urban regions of about 80 000 - 200 000 inhabitantsin Finland. In addition, the indicators can also be used in strategic level planning and decision making.Another target of the project was to enhance the use of data and analysis methods in planning. A lot ofdifferent datasets, registers and systems with readily usable analysis methods exist in public state andmunicipal sources, but little is used because of ignorance, lack of skills, or lack of time. In this projectcriteria and indicators were developed according to the best available scientific knowledge connected toeasily available data and methods to enable planning departments in urban regions to carry out theanalyses and calculate the indicators by themselves. Because of the regional perspective spatial GIS datawas used as much as possible to overcome the problem of administrative borders. Examined phenomenaare seldom restricted to administrative borders but form different kind of functional areas. In addition,functional areas are of different shape and size for different phenomena. In order to compare differenturban regions to each other, the urban region in the Seutukeke project was formed using a uniformmethod, according to which it consists of a functional urban region (densely populated areas belongingto one commuting area) (Ristimäki et al., 2003) and surrounding 10 and 15 km distance zones. Thesebuffer zones were selected on the basis of the distance from which urban dwellers in Finland mainlyconsume cultural ecosystem services in a form of outdoor recreation (Pouta and Heikkilä, 1998).2. Material and MethodsThe work for developing sustainability criteria and indicators for urban regions was started with puttingup an interdisciplinary research team of several research institutes. Leader of the project is the FinnishEnvironment Institute which mainly contributed to the ecological criteria and indicators together withthe University of Helsinki/Department of Environmental Sciences, Sito Group, and VTT TechnicalResearch Centre of Finland. Economic criteria and indicators were developed by Government Institutefor Economic Research and social criteria and indicators by Sito Group and National Institute for Healthand Welfare.Planning for the criteria was initiated in big workshops where all researchers co-operated to find acommon understanding on the targets and working methods of the project and after that to adjust thedifferent dimensions of sustainability together to form a concise and unified set of criteria andindicators. The research group consulted also other researchers and experts when needed to find thebest scientific knowledge for the research. The consulted experts include e.g. landscape planners, groundand surface water researchers, transport experts, and GIS experts. The project outline and later a draft32