Abstract

With more than half of the world’s population living in urban areas, providing sustainable living conditions is highly important. Among sustainable development goals, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015, SDG 11 focuses on providing inclusive, safe, sustainable, and resilient cities for human settlement. Many sustainability assessment tools, rating systems and frameworks have been developed to benchmark and measure sustainability in urban areas. Most neighborhood sustainability assessment tools rely on simplified, static indicators that are not evenly distributed across the pillars of sustainable development. The primary objective of this research is to develop a framework for monitoring and measuring the progress toward urban sustainability development. The research employed a systematic approach to acquire, prepare, and standardize urban data for sustainability assessment. Then, the localized indicator sets were collected from three primary sources, i.e.  SDGs, the new urban agenda, and the city prosperity initiative. The analysis was performed using two weighting approaches and normalization to derive a neighborhood sustainability score. The framework is then applied to nineteen neighborhood in Montreal, Quebec. Cluster analysis was employed to deepen the understanding of various variables. Results revealed that Verdun borough outperforms others, primarily due to its ample green space and accessible amenities, while Côte-des-Neiges ranks lower, reflecting deficiencies in green areas and basic services. An interactive decision-support tool visualizes these results. The implications of this research provide insights enabling policymakers and stakeholders to pinpoint improvement areas. By emphasizing transparent data handling and flexible indicator selection, this approach can be replicated in diverse urban contexts to measure, compare, and guide progress toward sustainable development goals at the neighborhood scale.