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What Works, and Why?: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Cities' Sustainability Initiatives

This essay lays the foundation for the Urban Sustainability Assessment (USA) project, which aims to provide useful information to planners as they make decisions about which programs to pursue and how to go about designing and implementing them. After briefly laying out the rationale for urban sustainability, we describe the kinds of initiatives currently under way in U.S. cities. We then outline our approach to assessing the effectiveness of those efforts. That approach involves gathering detailed information on both program design and political factors, as well as on program outputs. We will construct logic models that link those data, and relates them to environmental outcomes. The result will be a series of focused assessments that we hope will prove valuable to program officials.