Sustainable Cities and Intergenerational Evaluation: Towards a Hybrid Evaluation Framework for Future-oriented Cultural Urban Governance

Abstract

Contemporary cities stand at the crossroads of structural challenges - climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequalities, and resource crises - which make it urgent to overcome the urban development models inherited from the twentieth century. This contribution analyses two emerging paradigms of urban transformation - the Circular City and the 15-Minute City - identifying their convergences and the cultural, institutional, and evaluative conditions necessary for their implementation. The two models share a common relational matrix: the quality and density of relationships among actors, functions, spatial scales, and generations constitute the structuring variable of long-term urban sustainability. Circularity itself is reinterpreted as the interaction of three mutually reinforcing dimensions - temporal, spatial, and social/relational. The 15-Minute City can be interpreted as the spatial and operational translation of the Circular City at the neighbourhood scale, transforming proximity from a theoretical principle into a physically “measurable” and operational condition. A cross-cutting dimension shared by both models, yet systematically underestimated by traditional planning, is the intergenerational one: urban decisions produce effects unfolding over decades, shaping the wellbeing opportunities of generations that still have no voice in decision-making processes. The paper develops a comparative analysis of the main international wellbeing evaluation frameworks, identifying significant convergences and unresolved critical issues. Building upon the observations from the comparative analysis, the contribution introduces a conceptual framework that proposes a structure to support the development of hybrid intergenerational evaluation tools for assessing urban transformations, that is to identify the key dimensions that future context-specific evaluation approaches may consider. It is organized around two domains - quality of living in the present and transferable intergenerational capitals - crossed by two transversal dimensions in a hierarchical relationship: culture as a foundational condition and governance as an enabling mechanism. Future research will focus on identifying context-sensitive indicator sets, testing alternative weighting approaches, and empirically validating the framework through urban case studies.