Defining and Measuring Sustainable Cities ENVIRONMENT 05- 1 Environment 05 Sydney sucks! (chews and spits): Defining and measuring vortex cities and sustainable cities. Phil McManus University of Sydney Email: pmcmanus@mail.usyd.edu.au ABSTRACT Sydney is increasingly oriented to compete in the global city stakes. This necessitates achieving higher rates of economic growth than rival cities, particularly in sectors such as international finance. Economic growth has spatial and resource dimensions that conflict with many visions of what constitutes a sustainable city. Sydney is Australia’s largest vortex city, sucking in resources for production and consumption and using other parts of the planet to assimilate wastes. This paper analyses the strengths and weaknesses of competing definitions and measuring techniques to identify sustainable cities, including Ecological Footprint Analysis, Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously and Sustainability Indicators. It applies these and other concepts to Sydney, thereby highlighting the critical choice of definition and measuring technique in debates about the sustainability of cities. The conclusion identifies the importance of communication, education and implementing appropriate processes to reduce the most unsustainable practices in Sydney, and in other Australian cities. INTRODUCTION “The lack of attention of global cities research on the urban environment is one of the most disturbing gaps in our understanding of global cities”. (Short, 2004, 20) Australian cities are increasingly oriented to compete in the global city stakes. This is particularly the case in Sydney, which was cited in 11 of 15 studies of world cities analysed by Beaverstock, et al (1999), and updated to 12 of 16 studies by Taylor (2003). The variations in these studies alerted Beaverstock et al (2000) to the “poverty of data” in the world city literature. According to Beaverstock, et al, (2000, 43), “an Achilles heel of world city research is the lack of available data that quantifies the changing positions of cities in the world city system and hierarchy”. There appears, however, to be an abundance of data in comparison with the data available to measure sustainable cities. The silence in the world cities literature about environmental and sustainability issues (Short, 2004), could stem from a concern about a lack of data or viable approaches to measure sustainable cities, but is far more likely to arise from a neglect of sustainability issues by world city theorists who are focussed on corporate and electronic connectivity and hierarchies. One implication of this neglect is a gap between world cities that are focused on economic growth and cities that are aiming to achieve higher levels of sustainability. This paper is concerned with the spatial and resource dimensions of economic growth. Without economic growth, a city can neither maintain nor improve its status in world city league tables. Sydney has been positioned to attract economic growth, particularly the growth that emanates from being strategically positioned within global city hierarchies and networks. Metropolitan planning documents and studies since the early 1990s tend to vary in emphasis on the importance of economic competitiveness within a global economy, as opposed to enhancing Sydney’s pre-eminent position within the Australian urban system, or promoting the unifying vision of livability. Searle