Standards Development

Scope

This proposed standard is tailored to Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMC), by elaborating the relevant questions of the management system of sustainable development for SMC as below:

— Why would SMC authorities need a specific guidance standard for the management system of sustainable development?

— How could SMC be defined?

— What are differences of the specificities, and interested parties of SMC?

— How to correlate the implementation of the SDGs and ISO 37101 with the urgent practical needs of SMC?

— How to set reasonable and suitable management objectives, contents and implementation tasks and schemes for the sustainable development of SMC?

— How to set up self-assessment method after a progress of management system according to the specific context SMC?

This document follows the PDCA (plan-do-check-action) cycle that suits the sustainable management for SMCs by covering the contents including management methodology, implementation procedure, technical tools and tasks, and self-assessment. This document also keeps consistency with the 37101 Maturity Matrix, by presenting the various intermediate steps to achieving full 37101 eventually. The document could allow SMCs to cherry pick tools and measures from the existing standards and the indicators to tailor to their realistic achievements or distinctive needs, by providing reference of a collection of international standards that are particularly relevant and applicable for SMC, e.g. ISO 371XX, ISO 3712X, and ISO 3715X series, etc., enabling SMC to strengthen the overall capabilities in general, such as smartness, resilience, and sustainability, and some specific features, such as environment of doing business, smart infrastructure, tailored public services etc.

This document also recognizes update issues, such as the risk of pandemic. Climate action has now become more urgent. Social cohesion should now include vulnerability, indebtedness and intergenerational differences in expectations and capabilities. There is a need for international standard to be more flexible, but especially for the varied smaller settlements.

Purpose

This document, as a phased-implementation standard for ISO 37101 and ISO 37104, provides practical guidance for city authorities, particularly those small and medium-sized cities (SMCs), with realistic first-step targets. This in turn allows SMCs to have this intermediate stage of progress recognized, to improve the management system and contribute to most of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

This document enables SMCs to meet the partial requirements of ISO 37101, but recognizing that it is a long journey, and may be that they do not have sufficient resources to obtain ISO 37101 immediately. This document also allows for differentiation. Cities have specific characteristics due to their history, demographics, specialized production, geographic position, focus of innovation etc. It is helpful to allow SMCs to develop in a way that reflects and enhances these specializations. It will be their distinctive characteristics that underpin their attractiveness, quality of life and social cohesion. It will also produce specific cross-cutting issues and may therefore require a flexible standard that encourages diversity. Expected benefits of this management system for SMC include

— Strengthening the overall smartness, resilience, and sustainability, or some specific features, such as environment of doing business, smart infrastructure;

— Tools to evaluate the level and performance of sustainable development initiatives and characteristics such as smartness and resilience, also responding to update crisis such as pandemic;

— Enhanced local contribution to global UN Sustainable Development Goals;

— Ready for the next step towards obtaining ISO 37101 and ISO37104.

SMCs are usually referred to as “not large” cities or towns which will have an urban community under a specific administrative boundary. SMC have not only wider existence than big cities, but also distinguishing features and different needs from big cities. SMCs can also help countries to alleviate increasing pressure on the environment and natural resources through the development of holistic and integrated policies and regulations, which are caused by global urbanization.

Meanwhile, SMC are dependent on each other (e.g. multiple-nuclei model) and larger centres, as SMC may be short of capacities when attracting population, talents and fiscal resources. With the acceleration of urbanization, SMC may also be facing managerial problems, such as the lagging management strategy, too complicated sustainable management objectives, and imperfect legal systems.

This is why the SMC authorities will be more attempted to adopt simpler but more effective guidance with specific and tailored-made sustainable development framework, due to their limited capacities, which should be clearly focused to help the SMC to become being creative, characteristic, cooperative, connected and capable, as the practical needs. These could, in long run, help SMC to better undertake the functional buffer zone between big cities and rural areas.

Therefore, this international standard has universal meanings because SMC are widely spread in almost all countries across the world, and the big market needs could imply a wider application of the new standard.