Assessing Sustainability Behavior and Environmental Performance of Urban Systems: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In this systematic review, I cumulate previous research findings indicating that sustainable urbanism and networked public governance can be instrumental in carrying out extensive sustainability and resilience objectives through steering urban transformations in the direction of sustainability and resilience. Urban analytics data infrastructure, multicriteria sustainability evaluation, and sustainable performance assessment display the intricate network dynamics operational within cities, impacting urban resilience decision-making processes and leading to equitable and sustainable urban development. Throughout July 2020, I conducted a quantitative literature review of the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest databases, search terms including “sustainable urban planning,” “urban sustainability assessment,” “sustainable urban governance/urban sustainability governance,” “sustainable urban development,” “sustainable/sustainability behavior,” and “environmental performance.” As I focused on research published exclusively in the past two years, only 301 various types of articles met the eligibility criteria. By removing those whose results were inconclusive, unconfirmed by replication, or too general, and because of space constraints, I selected 153, mainly empirical, sources. Future research should investigate whether the assessment of environmental sustainability performance of heterogeneous urban configurations by shared sustainability policymaking through spatial green infrastructure planning and regulations articulate sustainable urban design and governance for the development of innovative performance.

1. Introduction

The aim of this article is to review the existing literature on sustainability behavior and environmental performance of urban systems and synthesize the insights it provides on networked public governance. By debating the most recent (2019–2020) and relevant (Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest) sources, I have tried to prove that real-time urban sustainability assessment tools in environmentally sustainable urban planning and design, by use of sensor network data, may evaluate sustainability-conscious behaviors through sustainability-oriented performance approaches and patterns of urban development processes. In this systematic review, I cumulate previous research findings indicating that sustainable urbanism and networked public governance can be instrumental in carrying out extensive sustainability and resilience objectives through steering urban transformations in the direction of sustainability and resilience.

My main objective is to show that urban analytics data infrastructure, multicriteria sustainability evaluation, and sustainable performance assessment display the intricate network dynamics operational within cities, impacting urban resilience decision-making processes and leading to equitable and sustainable urban development. What I want to clarify is whether groundbreaking sustainability approaches and urban governance structures can harness analytical procedures for coherent urban sustainability assessment. I contribute to the literature on urban sustainability governance by explaining how custom-designed sustainability-rating tools/indicators and sustainable urban development planning and dynamics can shape environmentally responsible behavior, taking into account the social and spatial structure of the cities.

Actuality and novelty of the research are configured by approaching a hot emerging topic (sustainability behavior of urban networks) and elucidating how cutting-edge systems of indicators can be harnessed as decision-support mechanisms in the direction of sustainable urban development. The research problem developed throughout the paper is whether city rankings, assessment standards, and performance indicators can successfully orient and appraise strategies carried out by local administrations in the sphere of sustainability. City-level sustainability evaluation criteria reorganize sustainable development as a fashionable urban architecture. Urban planning is a decisive tool in accomplishing particular sustainability objectives. Networked decision-making undertakings may ensure the sustainable enhancement of the urban settings.

2. Methodology

I have performed a systematic review of available literature on sustainability behavior and environmental performance of urban systems employing Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. The inclusion criteria were (i) publication date between 2019 and 2020, (ii) being an original empirical research or review article, (iii) written in English, and (iv) covered certain search terms. Studies were excluded from the review if they were (i) editorial materials and (ii) books. I have used the Systematic Review Data Repository (SRDR), a powerful tool for the extraction, management, and analysis of data for my systematic review. Collecting and inspecting publicly accessible documents (scientific articles) as evidence, no institutional ethics approval was needed before commencing my research.

Throughout July 2020, I conducted a quantitative literature review of the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest databases, search terms including “sustainable urban planning,” “urban sustainability assessment,” “sustainable urban governance/urban sustainability governance,” “sustainable urban development,” “sustainable/sustainability behavior,” and “environmental performance.” As I focused on research published exclusively in the past two years, only 301 various types of articles met the eligibility criteria. By removing those whose results were inconclusive, unconfirmed by replication, or too general, and because of space constraints, I selected 153, mainly empirical, sources (

Table 1. Topics and types of papers identified and selected.

Topic	Identified	Selected
sustainable urban planning	82	44
urban sustainability assessment	68	42
sustainable urban governance/urban sustainability governance	68	41
sustainable urban development	74	51
sustainable/sustainability behavior	93	54
environmental performance	47	25
Type of Paper	Identified	Selected
original research	278	146
review	26	7
editorial	12	0
book	16	0

Source: Processed by the author. Some topics overlap.

).

3. Real-Time Urban Sustainability Assessment Tools in Environmentally Sustainable Urban Planning and Design

Carrying out sustainable development practices [1,2,3,4,5] would ensure permanent economic ascendancy and social prosperity. Physical and political setting, type of government, and economic condition impact local governments’ undertakings on the implementation of sustainability practices. Sustainability plans can be successful in driving newly designed local sustainability operations, but fostering perpetual implementation of the latter necessitates an extensive process, encompassing local capacity, political backing, public engagement, social equity, and interdepartmental partnership. To tackle the commonness and intricacies of sustainable development challenges, entities activating in the business, government, and nonprofit spheres are working closely through multi-stakeholder partnerships, integrating their knowledge and resources to accomplish shared and organization-specific objectives. Urban dwellers’ perception and social responsibility to consent to decisions in addition to the multiplying impact of outcomes to the environment, practicality, and funding manageability should be taken into account before the appreciation of resolutions. Partnership capacity is determined by the pattern of decision-making operations, in addition to internal processes that regulate collaborative activities. Local governments having significant sustainability actions integrate social equity objectives, allocate staff and budget resources to the specific endeavors, involve the urban residents, and further interdepartmental partnership. Systems of indicators can be harnessed as decision-support mechanisms in the direction of sustainable urban development.

Private sector participants both facilitate and hinder sustainability-oriented approaches [6,7,8,9,10] at various scales. Cities tend to integrate sustainable development into their dynamic planning, while urban green space availability is pivotal to urban sustainability advancement. The spatial models of land use may configure multidimensional features of sustainability. City-level sustainability evaluation criteria reorganize sustainable development as a fashionable urban architecture. Surpassing a region-specific perspective of the urban environment, the sustainable city notion facilitates an integrated grasp of city dynamics, consequently preventing unpredictable and unsystematic development. Small- and medium-sized enterprises influence sustainability determinants by engaging in established political mechanisms and social mobilizations, and by formulating and challenging policies, traversing urban decision-making operations, and adjusting business processes to political convictions and identities. Particular approaches, procedures, and implementation phases, in addition to systematization of assessment standards, are needed to carry out sustainable city development. City rankings, assessment standards, and performance indicators can successfully orient and appraise strategies carried out by local administrations in the sphere of sustainability, but such mechanisms for urban measurement may disregard problematical interconnections, being deficient in transparency as regards data gathering, weighting, and the aggregation process within their operational design.

A multicriteria analysis is broadly deployed to carry out sustainability assessment in decision-making or progress evaluation subsequent [11,12,13,14,15,16] to a selected sustainable development notion. The examination of methodological apprehensions in the architecture of multicriteria sustainability assessment shifts the interpretation from deterministic to probabilistic, thus leading to well-defined and integrated sustainability outcomes or decisions. When handled through the constant involvement of urban dwellers, intricate issues lead to enhanced urban governance, furnishing in-depth feedback while ensuring the extended sustainability of the initiated changes. Across spheres of urban governance, scale and regional prime concerns, shared challenges of imbalance, responsibility, and sustainability occur, in addition to capability requirements, requiring cooperation in co-designing, developing operational capacity, and articulating coherent projects so as to improve urban liveability. Large-scale climate change, swift sprawl, and intense economic development justify sustainable human advancement, urban ecological administration, and an energy-efficient shift. With growing urban populations and expanding built-up system interconnectivity, cities are likely to shift towards regional clusters, turning out to be networked entities that show self-sustainable characteristics. Having essentially a significant interactive approach, upgrading processes may improve government practices and strategies, while shaping urban designs, generating technological breakthroughs, reinforcing complementary construction routines, and embracing a sustainable and inclusive built-up development route.

The urban expansion has resulted in the constitution of built-in areas and furthered the economic development [17,18,19,20,21], while affecting the environment. The coherent utilization of urban landscape is a difficult task for governments to attain sustainable and robust growth. Within sustainable development strategies and operational patterns, cross-scale networking reunites in diverse endeavors to be involved with local participants, developing the connections between local areas and routines and the underlying forces of broad geographical scales. To improve sustainable development, local governments should harness urban planning mechanisms that may assist them in identifying adequate procedures and priority intervention spheres within built-up areas, thus articulating a viable decision-making with reference to the planning and adoption of citified policies. A prominent insistence on teamwork to reach mutual apprehension and decision-making may overlook particular, comprehensive system knowledge that is crucial in giving precedence to designed and contextualized undertakings aiming for sustainable development. Municipalities can be determining in the extensive operations of urban sustainability transitions. Municipalities act in a large-scale democratic fabric, where their furthering of sustainability and accountability by use of unambiguous mechanisms and unbiased inclusion involves a critical dissimilarity between public and private participants in the sizeable institutional urban environment. The urban multilevel governance structures and operations may hamper or facilitate the empowerment of the local built-up capacity.

As cities are developing while handling sustainability objectives and challenges [22,23,24,25,26,27,28], the consequences generated by the local, small-scale operations occurring throughout urban areas may be serious. Urban planning is a decisive tool in accomplishing particular sustainability objectives. Comprehending whether present interventions comprise urban areas as intricate systems necessitates an insistence on operations and results to facilitate systemic change. To further sustainable routes locally, cities should allocate resources and develop capacity to advance the link and over-reliance between the mechanisms of transformation and enactment articulating a relevant connection between the project-specific structuring operation and the urban strategic advancement. The setting up of an indicator set reinforces robust administration while articulating an unambiguous local line of action for urban sustainable development. Cities represent human-natural systems reinforced by underlying ecosystem services working jointly in elaborate manners with the fluid conditions of urban areas. Urban renewal routines may enhance social sustainability with manageable user-oriented built environments.

Subjective perceptions can be used in conjunction with unbiased indicators [29,30,31,32,33] to obtain thorough data and understanding of the standard of urban environments. Purposefully becoming involved with intricate sustainability challenges necessitates systemic changes. Urban governance ensured by robust sustainability institutions may consolidate the regulative operations and organizational culture that legitimize local communities. Urban sustainable operations are physically fashioned and transformed throughout their advancement by local governance and economic participants. The integration of sustainable behaviors in practical and cultural standards in both regime entities and mutual societies is essential in sustainability transition.

Cities have to set up responsibility processes that reorganize the spheres of accountability for the systemic and translocal consequences of urban sustainability proposals [34,35,36,37,38,39,40], generate significant sustainability issues while representing robust environments for sustainability transformation, which are essential areas for the development of sustainability transitions, and encounter escalating risks from various sources, undertaking multifarious strategies to come through, surmount, and adjust to shocks and stresses. Urban sustainability assessment represents a main difficult task as a result of the encompassed integrative features that make the appraisal operation intricate and impede the performance of available monitoring tools. As urban population will grow, preserving urban ecosystem services for sustainable and social prosperity in cities is of great importance. Harnessing successful creative-led sustainable approaches is related to the consolidation of local planning capacities and the advancement of coherent network governance readiness.

Ecosystem services are essential [41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50] in urban sustainability infrastructure. Urban systems catalyze sustainable economic development. For the purpose of attaining sustainable urban development, the prosperity of citizens should be enhanced within the limited ecological resources. rban areas and their administrations are dissimilar in their likelihood to carry out sustainable policy breakthroughs and public management reorganizations. Local institutional settings considerably shape the pattern and extent of sustainability transitions. The local municipality constitutes a relevant domain for advancing and carrying out proposals for a shift to extended sustainable development. Geospatial data produced by use of field-based collaborative mapping can smooth the way for cities in getting ready for sustainability issues. Urban quality assessment is a difficult task because of the wide-ranging character of the domain and the intricacy of aspects that must be explained away. Expanding urban areas are confronting an escalated elaborateness of joint action and sustainable management. Sustainable urban land planning requires transiting to policy assimilation and flexible administration, necessitating a pattern refashioning of the human–nature link.

Urban resilience is a large-scale built-up policy project [51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58], so that cities can adjust to and come through shocks and stresses. Swift urban expansion may generate significant appropriation of ecological lands and disintegration of natural settings. Urban green spaces and the associated ecosystem services are instrumental in configuring sustainable urban planning and development. The swift urban growth leads to a massive challenge in maintaining the standard of local setting and life features in urban sustainability governance. Networked decision-making undertakings may ensure the sustainable enhancement of the urban settings. Urbanization is a connective operation of population accumulation and land use escalation. Sustainable urban planning processes reconfigure the link between cities and ecosystems. Urban planning approaches should aim for more sustainable, livable, and more robust development models.

Sustainability proposals constituted by local governments and various participants [59,60,61,62,63,64,65] demonstrate the heterogeneous aspects of urban transformative capacity. Configuring robust policies or articulating groundbreaking infrastructures may enhance the operation of urban systems and carry out sustainability goals. In sustainable urban development, interest is oriented towards surmounting the spatial imbalances, swift sprawl, socio-economic dissimilarities, and transport system networking challenges shaping the urban structure and standard of living. Urban sustainability undertakings can comprise results from land use arrangements, infrastructure financial support, energy production and distribution, greenhouse gas emissions decrease, and social policies. Enhancing the resource use degree and carrying out sustainable urban development necessitates collaboration and cross-border teamwork among various operational entities. Urban development facilitating significant densities of human communities does not generate sustainable behavior changes. Local institutional frameworks and multiscalar connections may enable green entrepreneurs to be system developers for citified transitions.

Urban sustainability assessment can be used as a clarifying mechanism [66,67,68,69,70,71,72] for both project planning and appraisal. Urban indicator systems can assess the sustainability operation of urban built environment. Achieving sustainability upsides from densification without decreasing the performance of social-ecological systems in bringing about prosperity for urban dwellers is pivotal in developing resilient cities. Urban transformations constitute a difficult task for facilitating large-scale routes on the way to sustainability and resilience. The intricacy that urban areas present to various parties requires systems-based and interconnected policies to straighten out sustainability challenges. Cities offer strategic environments for carrying through sustainable urban systems. Transitioning in the direction of a sustainable society involves systematic cutting-edge multicriteria decision-support mechanisms to evaluate and optimize the sustainability operation of urban systems.

Multicriteria urban sustainability assessment is a coherent mechanism for planners and investors by discerning associations between various sustainability aspects [73,74,75,76,77] in addition to emphasizing exemplary practices and prearranged prospects in cities. The heterogeneous character of cities and the unconcerned feedback of the current sustainability approaches require a reversed pattern in urban sustainability governance. Furthering urban resilience assists cities in reacting swiftly and adequately to ascertain and reduce the related effects and threats. Transformative capacity is a valuable tool in grasping the capacities and confines of developing urban governance breakthroughs for setting aside prevailing patterns and for generating systemic change facilitating sustainable urban futures. Green vegetation coverage is an important driver of ecosystem services taking into account the sustainability of urban areas and citizens’ standard of living.

4. Sustainability Behavior of Urban Systems

Urban residents are progressively essential data processors [78,79,80], and the harnessing of government performance information is prevalent to the subjects of democratic accountability, but human perceptions of governmental approaches and results are biased and averse to refashioning. Grasping how the urban residents evaluate the operation of elaborate, intergovernmental actions, such as sustainability behavior, is pivotal for comprehending both administrative decision-making and procedural design. Unprincipled reasoning of urban residents constitutes an extensive affective correlation with persistent treatment consequences throughout any kind of governmental endeavors while being determined by both the performance and political framework. Unprincipled determined reasoning may result in unreliable or distorted assessments of both the strength of particular initiatives and governmental performance. Supplying performance data on local government practice of federally undertaken sustainability endeavors may improve such reasoning.

Urban governance is paramount in furthering sustainable development [81,82,83]: groundbreaking modes of governance are typically not better than established hierarchical ones as regards fostering sustainability behavior, while their capacity can be exemplarily carried out in association with hierarchical administration. Local governments participate in risk-seeking behavior so as to cut down their likelihood for losses of former endeavors. The ecologically coherent conversion of natural resources into economic achievement constitutes an essential route in articulating urban sustainability behavior. Eco-efficiency evaluations represent a suitable mechanism for built-up sustainability transitions at various layers of an economic system. Managers’ evaluations of their own proficiency, cutting-edge reasoning, and risk culture shape their account of the risk–reward consonance of prospects with the aim of improving organizational performance throughout urban sustainability behavior.

Transitioning urban areas into sustainable models [84,85,86] necessitates a significant civic strategy of built-up sustainability behavior. Transitioning urban areas into sustainable patterns constitutes a difficult task to the local common values and rules of conduct displayed in its strategies, regulations, and public places. Local governmental endeavors to attain sustainability are instrumental within built-up areas. Urban sustainability behavior is a key collective-action conundrum taking into account the importance of environmental matters, economic difficulties, and social equity issues at citified scales. Social stratification and unbalanced sharing of political power are at the center of the mechanism of reconstructing cities as sustainable patterns. Issues regarding sustainable urbanism should not focus only on techno-managerialism or on citified environmental ethics: disconnecting social and political certainties from the routine and broad route of urban sustainability behavior removes the biased aspects of environmentalism.

Adequately customized strategies should be advanced for any socio-spatial situations [87,88,89] to inspect current and developing proposals to greenhouse gas emissions reduction and progress of urban sustainability behavior. The urban framework is a mechanism that generates more widespread outcomes, as regards what innovative types of urban transformation governance are developing, together with their effectiveness in bringing about urban sustainability behavior and resilience evolutions and in fashioning routes for adequately fortifying the operational capacities. Integrating the sustainability potential is necessary in the city-wide extended and assimilated climate and resilience objectives, together with the established and unofficial requirements and operations that are set up to mediate prime concerns, data, and resources of heterogeneous participants throughout domains and scales in consonance with such wide-ranging purposes. Thus, the alignment, governance, and teamwork of various participants and networks are reinforced following collective, prearranged, and prolonged goals and the advancement of co-beneficial climate ways out that harness coordinated synergies.

Evaluating the link between swift sprawl and ecosystem services [90,91,92] is instrumental in attaining urban sustainability behavior and development associated with planning and policies. Coherent and ecosystem protection-oriented design and strategies should be implemented for sustainable urban development that should be refashioned congruously with the ecological environment to further sustainable urban governance. The evaluation of urban sustainability behavior constitutes a key phase in planning, developing, and preserving sustainable cities. The urban ecosystem sustainability can be improved by use of coherent design and strategies. Evaluating and approximating losses of ecosystem services because of incessant sprawl is crucial for sustainable urban development locally and subsequent administration for urban development.

Big data offer groundbreaking manners of analyzing and enhancing networked environmental, social, and economic systems [93,94,95,96,97] to attain urban sustainability behavior. Carrying out coherent resource management is imperative for urban sustainability behavior. The harmonizing advancement among economic, social, and environmental substructures constitutes a relevant component of urban sustainability behavior impacting the level of sprawl. Swift urbanization impacts ecosystem steadiness and local urban sustainability behavior. The harnessing of cutting-edge analytics and big data are instrumental in configuring urban sustainability behavior.

In government sustainability, performance represents a complex notion [98,99,100] and is thus difficult to assess. Public entities can develop entrepreneurial orientation for improving sustainability behavior by use of capacity-building and performance management. The latter, taking into account local sustainability behavior, is comparable with organizational performance, by analogizing government results with expected outcomes or purposes. For local governments, the entrepreneurial orientation–perceived sustainability performance connection is significantly shaped by the mediating prearranged undertaking of performance management, relative to initiation and interorganizational teamwork. Local government managers should discerningly involve team members, factor in intrepidity, develop capacity, and adhere to innovation in sustainability. Organizational entrepreneurialism is instrumental in the designed governance of sustainability performance. An entrepreneurial orientation impacts perceptions of sustainability performance indirectly, while mediating the ramifications of capacities on such an operation. Prearranged undertakings of performance data deployment, initiation, and interorganizational teamwork mediate the link between entrepreneurial orientation and perceived sustainability performance.

Sustainability assessments [101,102,103,104] assist in the adjustment toward sustainability behavior. The character of social sustainability resides in enhancing citizens’ standard of living. In the convolution of the social ecosystems, the robust potentiality of urban governance assimilates data and adjustability into the organizations furthering resilience changes and sustainability transformation. The swift and extensive urbanization results in uncontrollable land-use conversion and negative consequences for ecosystem services and, thus, reinforcing regional planning for sustainability behavior is needed. Urban resilience and sustainability behavior can be associated to articulate a viable urban transformation. Resilient adaptive operations bolstered by organizational and social prospects as regards sustainability regulate adaptive systems. Integral to the developing of resilient societies is the performance of urban governance, constituted by various preparatory measures and operational processes essential in evaluating development consequences. The link between sprawl and ecosystem services is consistently associated with certain indicators to assess the degree of urbanization.

Possibly involving action-oriented policy shifts, resilience is a constituent of sustainability behavior as the prevailing administrative fabric in the sphere of urban planning [105,106,107,108,109], articulating the requirements for coherent and adequate governance in an elaborate, networked, and fluid environment abounding in systematic risk. Public approaches can be important for dissemination, furthering, and upscaling, while impacting the acceleration and orientation of essential innovations to sustainability transitions. Organizational frameworks, local cultures, social infrastructures, and certain networks or resource contributions facilitate or hamper the development of transitions to sustainability behavior. Systems frameworks designed for distinct urban areas develop by consolidating various aspects of sustainability behavior, informing how particular undertakings perceived as beneficial may have detrimental consequences when evaluated across heterogeneous evidence. Various participants and social groups are likely to diverge as regards the most valuable breakthroughs and progression routes for sustainability transitions. The linkage between energy use, pollutant emissions, and the level of involvement as regards finite resources affect the sustainability behavior of urban systems.

Urban ecosystem services are instrumental in coordinating the planning, design, and administration of urban settings [110,111,112,113,114,115,116] towards sustainability behavior. Shared and network governance is crucial for the sustainability behavior of citified social-ecological-technical approaches. Urban spatial development is a key matter for spatial planning and built-up administration by shaping the sustainability behavior of cities. Sustainability behavior of urban networks and their infrastructure is indispensable as cities develop in population and resource consumption. As economies keep on urbanizing, there is a need to clarify how sustainability behavior can be assessed and carried out. Cities are attempting to improve their ecological performance to attain sustainability behavior. To advance a sustainability assessment agenda, particular criteria should be used to adequately assist decision-making towards sustainability behavior.

5. Environmental Performance of Urban Systems

The relevance of sustainability behavior necessitates that organizations preserve or bring about competitiveness [117,118,119,120], while responsibly assuming their primary role in enhancing the social and environmental consequences of human undertakings. The growing urban environmental footprints require the assimilation of sustainability determinants into urban planning and development arrangements. Sustainable urban development necessitates carefully planned transportation systems, constant decrease in pollution and energy use, while stimulating the adoption of sustainable energy resources and of waste recycling. Sustainable urban development is decisive to city strategic planning, as sustainability behavior constitutes a vital feature of environmental protection, social interconnection, and economic growth. Cutting-edge urban sustainability evaluation systems developed on landsenses ecology have to integrate natural components, physical insights, and psychological interpretations, while assisting decision makers in advancing effective management strategies. As regards expanding sprawl, groundbreaking approaches are needed to administer urban living systems and to set up an official procedure for evaluating the environmental performance of cities together with their operational infrastructures.

Urban sustainability assessment arrangements tackle thoroughly the convolution of the urban settings by use of a systems method [121,122,123,124], taking into account environmental, social, and economic demands. Swift urban growth has gradually endangered urban environments, thus impacting urban sustainability assessment. The disintegration of cities into more compact urban systems streamline the intricacy and configuration of urban form patterns typifying the residential building stock, enabling participants engaged in built-up operations to set up environmental strategies to further sustainable urban development proposals. Scrutinizing urban system metrics, quantified by sensor networks, by harnessing operational semantics offers an integrated appraisal of the heterogeneous urban landscape, enhancing the administration of various data, furthering knowledge exchange, and systematically capturing the networking of urban indicators for completely deploying adequate instantaneous urban sustainability assessments. Notwithstanding their magnitude or region, urban agglomerations may serve as mechanisms of economic growth and as channels of environmental and climate sustainability behavior that can lead to both socio-economic attainments and low-carbon results.

The mechanism of sprawl and built-up land use conversion disorganizes the fabric and function of urban environments and their potential to supply ecosystem services [125,126], and thus it is difficult to assimilate the latter into coherent strategies and planning locally to attain sustainable urban development. Local urban-ecological sustainability behavior derived from scientific evaluation, planning, and design furnishes sound grounds for sustainable urban development and environmental administration. Evaluating and balancing various trade-off prospects between ecological operations and built-up enlargement, integrating planning and design into contiguously specific approaches, and assimilating ecosystem services into decision-making methods can fully leverage spatial patterns of urban development. Environmental multifunctionality and local ecological networks are considerably enhanced by adopting a consolidated strategy to planning and design, which can supply critical data for area systematization to manage ecological protection and urban development.

Administering urban resources efficiently constitutes a sizable indicator for orienting the operational routines in the direction of sustainable urban development [127,128,129], consequently assisting in evaluating the dynamic networking between human performance and the environmental system. The built-up green infrastructure strategy attempts to mitigate the adverse consequences of climate change and environmental deterioration, while enhancing the standard of living by supplying a broad diversity of ecosystem services. The sustainable sprawl approach focuses on achieving the economic development of urban areas by associating it with social and environmental accountabilities and practicalities, thus drawing plans of sustainable cities and handling constant changes. Cities are under incessant constraints as a consequence of population growth and societal disagreements.

Ways out that adequately further sustainable development in built-up settings [130,131,132] necessitate proficiency in comprehending human–environment synergies. Adaptive potential operated by citified social systems is crucial for sustainability behavior. Analyzing and assessing the spatiotemporal features of an urban configuration and its link with sustainable development constitutes the grounds of urban planning, leading to a better grasp of swift sprawl that may be valuable in furthering approaches for subsequent urban planning and built-up sustainable development. Decision-making processes are instrumental in enhancing the sustainability behavior of public governance. Cultural progress and personal development constitute relevant soft power aspects shaping distinct pro-environmental behavior and performance in relation to urban sustainability that can be furthered by environmental adaptation reinforced by collective endeavors from governments, companies, society, and citizens. Urban configuration typifies the spatial arrangement of fixed built-up components, thus impacting environmental sustainability behavior.

Sustainable development infrastructures [133,134,135,136] should encompass the institutional positioning of the harmonizing components shaping sustainability behavior. Interconnections of local entities for sustainability behavior as intermediary urban instruments reinforce cities by use of teamwork, alignment, and data gathering and distribution, being influential in advancing urban agendas. Transnational city networks can organize data flows throughout levels, leading to coherent knowledge assimilation in cities and developing projects on urban biodiversity. A fabric of legislation and administrative approaches assimilated in the prearranged environmental evaluation to ensure adequate sustainable regularized urban governance should be carried out. Built-up environmentally friendly infrastructure and nature-based ways out constitute efficient tools in dealing with urban sustainability challenges, while building upon an adequate grasp of elaborate social-ecological systems to operate in due manner. The growing importance of cities as transnational participants brings about the demand to adjust prearranged environmental planning locally to the adoption of large-scale objectives.

Reconstructing cities into environmentally friendly, resilient, and sustainable areas [137,138,139,140] necessitates action comprising nearly all segments of society. Nature-based ways out may configure undertakings for societal challenges necessitating urban sustainability transformation, while attempting to optimize environmental, social, and economic upsides. The urban settings are typified by numerous constraints generated by population growth, transport-related emissions, and the deterioration of environmental areas, but ecosystem services can be effective tools for sustainability behavior. Local governments attempt to monitor and evaluate all progressing urban climate activities, governing thorough decision-making and transformative potential. Adopting strategic spatial planning by insisting on environmental sustainability behavior is influenced by urban management systems, being constituted and conditioned by the co-action between local strategies and administrative management approaches. The attempt of strategic spatial planning to maximize environmental sustainability behavior necessitates furthering policy and organization requirements focusing on low-carbon goals.

Cutting-edge ecologically related tools [141,142,143,144,145,146,147,148] can be deployed to evaluate economic advancements, technological breakthroughs, environmental sustainability behavior, and urban liveability. Environmental and social change components mobilize the management operations of urban community green spaces. The degree to which cities network with external entities on intricate and transboundary climate, environmental, and energy matters, is influenced by local administrative capacity, fashioning the link between performance and partnership in urban sustainability projects. The converging challenges of rapid sprawl, increasing inequality, climate change, environmental risk, and economic sustainability necessitate innovative modes of urban governance. Sustainable competitiveness provides a far-reaching evaluation of the joint underlying forces of the social, environmental, and economic determinants of sustainable development. Environmental awareness shapes behaviors of citizens and urban systems in preparation of more sustainable options. Evaluating urban environmental sustainability behavior is crucial for managing urban areas to attain sustainable urban development. Sustainability behavior is an organizing framework requiring incessant refashioning while networking with the interconnected structure of spatial social-environmental operations.

6. Sustainable Urban and Territorial Planning

The carrying out of socio-ecological systems of governance, urban landscape analysis as a standard for assessing the sustainable growth of peri-urban areas, the spatial parameterization of unmanageable urban growth patterns, and the adoption of socioeconomic approaches in determining the destabilizing urban growth patterns articulate current sustainable urban and territorial planning [149,150,151,152,153]. Confined coastal seas and wetlands represent regions having significant ecological relevance with peculiar fauna and flora significantly affected by environmental calamities. The administration of such natural territories is elaborate in advanced economies, heterogeneously concentrated human activity, and anthropizing characteristics impacting the stability of the ecosystem. Globalization and the advancement of the shared economy have accompanied the extensive refashioning of mass tourism, shaping the urban redesign of cities, with its features thoroughly associated with real estate speculative investments. Tourism, urban sprawl, and the consequences of the real estate bubble have brought about incongruous occurrences in peri-urban areas reconfigured due to the complexity of the agrifood processes altering their landscape. The growth rate is a driver of inequality in the urban expansion of cities. A chief aspect of rural–urban migration episodes that have influenced the blooming of megacities in less advanced economies is the demand to assimilate huge volumes of individuals by operations of swift growth of its built-up plot, thus leading to use of peri-urban areas, cityscape poor layout, or the extended sustainability of transformative mechanisms in the urban landscape. The built-up spatiotemporal reorganizations of cities indicate asymmetric growth and proliferating social polarization, displaying passivity in reconfiguring cities struggling with unsteady built-up areas and growth eventualities of gated communities.

7. Discussion

Cities tend to integrate sustainable development into their dynamic planning. The urban multilevel governance structures and operations may hamper or facilitate the empowerment of the local built-up capacity. Expanding urban areas are confronting an escalated elaborateness of joint action and sustainable management. Enhancing the resource use degree and carrying out sustainable urban development necessitates collaboration and cross-border teamwork among various operational entities. The heterogeneous character of cities and the unconcerned feedback of the current sustainability approaches require a reversed pattern in urban sustainability governance. Urban sustainability behavior is a key collective-action conundrum taking into account the importance of environmental matters, economic difficulties, and social equity issues at citified scales. The evaluation of urban sustainability behavior constitutes a key phase in planning, developing, and preserving sustainable cities. The harnessing of cutting-edge analytics and big data are instrumental in configuring urban sustainability behavior.

Urban resilience and sustainability behavior can be associated to articulate a viable urban transformation. Various participants and social groups are likely to diverge as regards the most valuable breakthroughs and progression routes for sustainability transitions. To advance a sustainability assessment agenda, particular criteria should be used to adequately assist decision-making towards sustainability behavior. The sustainable sprawl approach focuses on achieving the economic development of urban areas by associating it with social and environmental accountabilities and practicalities. Urban configuration typifies the spatial arrangement of fixed built-up components, thus impacting environmental sustainability behavior. Environmental awareness shapes behaviors of citizens and urban systems in preparation of more sustainable options.

When handled through the constant involvement of urban dwellers, intricate issues lead to enhanced urban governance. Purposefully becoming involved with intricate sustainability challenges necessitates systemic changes. Sustainable urban planning processes reconfigure the link between cities and ecosystems. Urban indicator systems can assess the sustainability operation of an urban built environment. Grasping how the urban residents evaluate the operation of elaborate, intergovernmental actions such as sustainability behavior is pivotal for comprehending both administrative decision-making and procedural design. The urban framework is a mechanism that generates more widespread outcomes as regards what innovative types of urban transformation governance are developing. The urban ecosystem sustainability can be improved by use of coherent design and strategies. The character of social sustainability resides in enhancing citizens’ standard of living.

The link between sprawl and ecosystem services is consistently associated with certain indicators to assess the degree of urbanization. Urban spatial development is a key matter for spatial planning and built-up administration by shaping the sustainability behavior of cities. The growing urban environmental footprints require the assimilation of sustainability determinants into urban planning and development arrangements. Adaptive potential operated by citified social systems is crucial for sustainability behavior. Transnational city networks can organize data flows throughout levels. Sustainability behavior is an organizing framework requiring incessant refashioning while networking with the interconnected structure of spatial social-environmental operations.

8. Conclusions

Significant research has lately analyzed whether the advancement and deployment of urban sustainability indicators through urban sustainability governance and planning processes, and mechanisms that build networks furthering urban sustainability and resilience, shape the consequences of urban sprawl on environmental sustainability. Carrying out coherent resource management is imperative for urban sustainability behavior. The robust potentiality of urban governance assimilates data and adjustability into the organizations furthering resilience changes and sustainability transformation. Systems frameworks designed for distinct urban areas develop by consolidating various aspects of sustainability behavior. Cities are attempting to improve their ecological performance to attain sustainability behavior. Sustainable urban development is decisive to city strategic planning. Decision-making processes are instrumental in enhancing the sustainability behavior of public governance. Adopting strategic spatial planning by insisting on environmental sustainability behavior is influenced by urban management systems.

The conclusions drawn from the above analyses indicate that measuring sustainable urban development planning and urban environmental sustainability performance by considering the particular requirements and regulations that have resulted in the urban design of spatial governance bolsters decision-making due to consistent and transparent sustainable city indicators, criteria, and metrics. Sustainability plans can be successful in driving newly designed local sustainability operations. To improve sustainable development, local governments should harness urban planning mechanisms that may assist them in identifying adequate procedures and priority intervention spheres within built-up areas. Urban areas and their administrations are dissimilar in their likelihood to carry out sustainable policy breakthroughs and public management reorganizations. Configuring robust policies or articulating groundbreaking infrastructures may enhance the operation of urban systems and carry out sustainability goals. Cities offer strategic environments for carrying through sustainable urban systems. Groundbreaking modes of governance are typically not better than established hierarchical ones as regards fostering sustainability behavior. Coherent and ecosystem protection-oriented design and strategies should be implemented for sustainable urban development.

As limitations in the current review, by focusing only on articles published in journals indexed in the Web of Science, Scopus, and ProQuest databases covering the past two years, I inevitably disregarded other valuable sources. Future research should investigate whether the assessment of environmental sustainability performance of heterogeneous urban configurations by shared sustainability policymaking, through spatial green infrastructure planning and regulations, articulate sustainable urban design and governance for the development of innovative performance.