The American Planning Association's 100th National Conference will be held this year in Las Vegas, Nevada, April 27 through May 1, 2008. From the conference website:

Keynote speakers are the highlight of the National Conference. UN Undersecretary and UN-Habitat Executive Director Anna Tibaijuka looks ahead to the future of sustainable development. ESRI President Jack Dangermond looks at the future from a geographic perspective. And New Yorker architectural critic Paul Goldberger looks back on the seminal work Learning from Las Vegas.

So why is this of particular interest to community indicators practitioners? I'm glad you asked.

Several sessions are devoted to indicators and measurement:

Session S454, Measuring City Performance and the Quality of Life, will be held on Monday afternoon. Clive Graham and Lisa M. Voight will "Explore a World Bank initiative to develop indicators that measure city performance and quality of life in a standardized format across the globe. The Internet-based system allows cross-city comparisons and third-party verification, and enables cities to share best practices and to learn from each other."

Session S610, Green Community Indicators, Diagnostic Methods, and Programs, will feature Jeffrey L. Soule saying "A variety of approaches can guide communities in their effort to become greener. From LEED-ND, to the National Association of Counties sustainability indicator program, to simple checklists, communities are figuring out where they stand. This session looks at the pros and cons of different approaches and offers a look at APA’s tools and techniques."

You've also got S018 Neighborhood Analysis, Visioning, and Planning for Action, S022 How Large Is Your Carbon Footprint?, and S302 An Economic Atlas for Indiana, which features "regional economic indicators and using, interpreting, and applying data from GIS mapping."

Anyone going to conference who'd be willing to take notes and report back?

CUES (the Catanese Center for Urban & Environmental Solutions at Florida Atlantic University)just sent me an announcement of their Florida Planning Toolbox. I went immediately to the section on benchmarking tools to see what they had to say.

Here's their announcement:

CUES, in partnership with the Florida Department of Community Affairs, is proud to announce the release of the Florida Planning Toolbox, an effort to further regional visioning initiatives in Florida by providing descriptions and examples of planning tools designed to protect and enhance natural resources, promote economic prosperity for all residents, and enable a sustainable quality of life. Tools have been compiled in sixteen broad categories, including agricultural land conservation, benchmarking, climate change, coastal planning, diversity and social equity, economic development, education and health, fiscal analysis & financing, housing, infill and redevelopment, land use planning & development, military-community growth planning, natural systems conservation, public involvement & education, transportation planning, and water resource planning. This issue of CUES News highlights some of the tools contained in the toolbox. The entire toolbox can be accessed in print and web-friendly versions at www.cuesfau.org/toolbox.

Here's what I saw:

The section on benchmarking tools separates out community scorecards and audits and community indicators.

They define "community scorecards and audits" as "A community scorecard or audit is a qualitative monitoring tool used by citizens and public officials to evaluate how well existing policies, projects, and plans meet a set of defined principles or to monitor progress in selected topic areas."

On the other hand, "Community indicators enable a community to understand where it has been and where it is going and identify areas for improvement to achieve a different outcome. Indicators projects use measurable data to shed light on trends (both positive and negative) for a current issue or, more typically, for a combination of issues that affects a community’s quality of life and economic well-being."

I really like the folks at CUES, and they do good work -- we've talked about their South Florida Indicators website before. But I find it hard to draw a clear dividing line between the "community scorecard" and "community indicators" types of projects, especially since the community scorecard model they highlight is that of SCOPE, which was directly modeled initially after the report featured under community indicators, that of JCCI. Maybe some of you can help me see the difference.

In any case, their new site is a nice tool and helps promote the use of community indicators (and scorecards!) in planning, which is A Good Thing. Congratulations, CUES!

There's a working paper by J. Ram Pilarisetti and Jeroen C.J.M. van den Bergh called
Sustainable Nations: What Do Aggregate Indicators Tell Us? The paper, published by the Tinbergen Institute in the Netherlands, examines the different results achieved when using three common measures of nation sustainability, and explores what this might mean.

The abstract says:

What is a ‘sustainable nation’ and how can we identify and rank ‘sustainable nations’? Are nations producing and consuming in a sustainable way? Aggregate indicators have been proposed to answer these questions. This paper quantitatively compares three aggregate indicators of sustainability: the World Bank’s ‘Genuine Savings’ measure, the ‘Ecological Footprint’ and the ‘Environmental Sustainability Index’. It is concluded that rankings of sustainable nations vary significantly among these indicators. Implications of this disagreement for analysis and policy are suggested.

I found the paper interesting -- you might enjoy it as well. It does a good job of pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of each of the three measures, and it notes that some countries fail in all three. But it also points that you can get opposite results using different measures, which is a good warning to all of use using indicators to pay careful attention to the measurement tools that we use.

From the conclusion:

The questions of sustainability of humanity’s consumption and identifying sustainable nations can not be conclusively answered using the three considered indicators. All indicators reflect methodological and measurement problems, and using each of them to rank sustainable nations or commenting on humanity’s consumption may yield erroneous results. Despite the limitations and lack of agreement among the various indicators, it might be worthwhile to check which nations are ranked low according to all indexes, according to EF and ESI, or EF and GS or ESI and GS. Besides the above 11 nations identified as the bottom performers by all indexes, EF and ESI also jointly identify 42 nations as unsustainable; EF and GS jointly consider 14 countries as unsustainable; and ESI and GS jointly view 17 countries as unsustainable. These nations perhaps most urgently would need to critically examine their economic development and environment policies.

Hat tip: Sustainable Options

There's more information available about the State of the USA project. While the project isn't finished, a new website provides an introduction to the work that's going on.

From the site:

People are hungry for objective sources of information. In today’s polarized society, Americans want ways to cut through biased agendas and find reliable facts about the issues that matter to them.

The State of the USA, Inc. (SUSA), a new nonprofit, will offer a website—as a public service—where every American can get the best available facts drawn from the country’s most respected sources. The site will be easy to use and available around the clock, so that people can find credible, relevant data in minutes or hours.

SUSA’s mission is to unite nonprofits, the media, government decision makers, business leaders, scientists, educators and citizens around a single goal: to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the country’s most pressing issues. SUSA will offer Americans a new tool to help them assess where our nation is moving forward and where it has stalled.

Knowing the state of the USA today and acting on that knowledge is our best opportunity to improve America for all generations.

They also have sample pages from the demonstration site you can look at. Take a peek!