Overview

Cities worldwide are transforming neighbourhoods to boost access to local shops, amenities, and services, while also prioritising nature and people over cars, creating lively public spaces, and supporting comfortable walking and cycling. These initiatives also play a crucial role in implementing climate action at a local level.

Building on the Green and Thriving Neighbourhoods Guidebook, which sets out a high-level approach to create ambitious net-zero and people-centred neighbourhoods, this framework helps cities to identify possible neighbourhood-level urban planning and design interventions based on the desired impact and provides tools to monitor and report their progress.

The framework enables cities to:

• Quickly build the case for neighbourhood-level interventions, accelerating local climate action.
• Select the optimal interventions to achieve intended impacts (e.g. access to sustainable food, affordable housing, community engagement, support for green jobs, and more).
• Measure change during and after the implementation of select interventions.

The framework is structured around two main parts:

• A Logic Model describing how a project is expected to bring about change.
• A set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which can be applied to measure change in a robust, transparent, and consistent manner.

Together, the two parts of the assessment framework present a method to identify the possible outputs (what is directly delivered or produced from an action), outcomes (the change generated by the outputs), and impacts (the long-term results) of projects at a neighbourhood level.

The framework is particularly useful for cities at the project scoping or definition phase, helping to prioritise interventions (inputs) based on the desired outcomes and outputs. During the project implementation or post-implementation phase, cities can use this assessment framework to measure, monitor, and report the progress of the project in a transparent, rigorous, and systematic way.

To access the framework, two resources are available for download (attached below):

• A Guidance Note, which provides an overview of the Logic Model concept and how it can be applied to neighbourhood interventions, and detailed guidance for how to use the Excel Key Performance Indicator (KPI) tool.
• An Excel-based Key Performance Indicator Tool, which contains a list of KPIs and supporting information such as measurement units, suggested data sources, data collection methodology, and relevant project phase. It is designed to allow the user to filter and select KPIs most relevant to the project.