Sustainable Latin American Cities? Evaluation of the Sustainability of the City of Puebla (Mexico) using indicators

Abstract

The urbanization process in Latin America is reaching an unprecedented speed. In this context, achieving the sustainability of Latin American cities is a strong challenge to attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed at the Summit held by the United Nations Organization in 2015. Sustainability assessment acquires a growing recognition as a diagnostic tool to move towards the ecological, social, economic and political objectives of sustainable development. Based on background studies, this paper proposes to evaluate the urban and environmental sustainability of the City of Puebla (Mexico) on the intra-urban scale in order to identify territorial contrasts that are manifested in the quality of life of its inhabitants. Founded on the indicators proposed in the Emerging and Sustainable Cities Initiative of the Inter-American Development Bank, a Sustainability Index (SI) was constructed and complemented with the analysis of the results of the Prosperous Cities Initiative (2016) and the Sustainable Cities Index (2018). It is worth mentioning that the favorable and unfavorable conditions of the SI are presented mainly in the peri-urban area of the city, exhibiting territorial contrasts, such is the case of the colonies belonging to the municipalities of San Pablo del Monte, Ocoyucan, San Pedro Cholula, San Andrés Cholula and Puebla. It also reflects a strong differentiation of conditions in terms of sustainability between the center and the periphery of the city. The results obtained are expected to deepen the integration of policies for present and future generations leading to the Sustainable Development Goals at the local level.