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Assessing Sustainability in Real Urban Systems: The Greater Cincinnati Metropolitan Area in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana
journal contribution
posted on 2016-02-20, 12:57 authored by Alejandra
M. Gonzalez-Mejía, Tarsha N. Eason, Heriberto Cabezas, Makram T. SuidanUrban systems have a number of factors (i.e., economic,
social,
and environmental) that can potentially impact growth, change, and
transition. As such, assessing and managing these systems is a complex
challenge. While, tracking trends of key variables may provide some
insight, identifying the critical characteristics that truly impact
the dynamic behavior of these systems is difficult. As an integrated
approach to evaluate real urban systems, this work contributes to
the research on scientific techniques for assessing sustainability.
Specifically, it proposes a practical methodology based on the estimation
of dynamic order, for identifying stable and unstable periods of sustainable
or unsustainable trends with Fisher Information (FI) metric. As a
test case, the dynamic behavior of the City, Suburbs, and Metropolitan
Statistical Area (MSA) of Cincinnati was evaluated by using 29 social
and 11 economic variables to characterize each system from 1970 to
2009. Air quality variables were also selected to describe the MSA’s
environmental component (1980–2009). Results indicate systems
dynamic started to change from about 1995 for the social variables
and about 2000 for the economic and environmental characteristics.