II. Restatement of the Problem
The International City Management Group (ICM) raised a series of tasks for our group to deal
with. These problems and our work can be restated as the following lists:
1) Considering the 3 E’s of sustainability and/or the 10 principles of smart growth,
design a metric to measure the smart growth of a city. According to the three E’s
requirement, we designed a three dimensional baseline cube model to determine
whether the smart growth of the city is successful or not. This model is based on
Smart Growth Index(SGI), Economic Development Index (EDI), Social justice
index (SJI) and Environment Performance Index(EPI). By utilizing EDI, SJI and
EPI, we can determine a city is smart growth or not. The SGI is used to measure the
level of the growth.
2) Select two mid-sized cities (with a population of between 100,000 and 500,000) on
different continents and measure how the current growth plan of each city meets the
smart growth principles. We selected Edinburgh and Wellington as our targets and
searched the growth plan of the two cities. Using the baseline cube model, we
measured and discussed how successfully their growth plan meets the smart growth.
3) Develop a growth plan for both cities over the next few decades and support your
choice of the components, after which use your metric to evaluate the success of your
smart growth plans. Based on the budget plan of the selected cities and our baseline
cube model, we developed modified cube model with a component matrix B. The
matrix B is consisted of seven components: transport service(B1), social service(B2),
environmental service(B3), education service(B4), health service(B5), development
service(B6) and other(B7). By maximizing the SGI, an optimal growth plan can be
achieved by changing B1,B2,B3,B4,B5,B6 and B7 to the optimal value. Since the
metric is based on the cube model and during the calculation process the SGI
achieves the maximum value, the optimal growth plan we developed can
automatically meet the smart growth requirement in our baseline cube model.
4) Rank the individual components in your smart growth plan according to their
potential. Compare the components and their ranking between the two cities. We
used our modified cube model to evaluate the potential of the individual components
and compared both the components and their rankings in the two cities.
5) Under the consumption that the population of the two cities will increase by
additional 50% by 2050, explain how your plan supports the growth. We evaluated
the extent to which our plans support the growth.
III. General Assumption
We assume that the statistics we collected from the website are reliable and accurate.
The data utilized in our models is mainly collected from valid statistics websites of Edinburgh
and Wellington, such as Scotland’s census[6], Statistics New Zealand[7]. Thus, this
assumption is reasonable.