USR – Urban Social Responsibility is a project partnered by LEIF Ethics Lab at the University of Catania. The project stems from research in Urban Ethics and aims to foster communication and further research on this field.
The core theme of USR is grounded in the concept of sustainability. This is a term which has a wider meaning than the common sense usually attributes. Sustainability involves several fields and stakeholders. USR has defined a specific set of figures and factors, which usually have relationships with cities.
The identification of the key-factors of sustainability is produces the USR parameters. USR also has outlined a range of values that those parameters can have in order to fall into the ethical framework.
The ethical framework allows USR to classify cities according to specific areas, parameters and combinations of them. According to the different combinations, USR can certify if a city falls into a specific set and satisfies the requirements.
The different areas that USR has identified are:
- Environment
- Citizenship
- Governance
- Economy
- Technology
Each area focuses on specific relevant parameters. It is important to understand that all the areas are not totally independent: on the contrary, they all tend to partially overlap and impact each other. Of course, a city can allocate resources for a specific field, for example Technology, and this field may or may not impact, let’s say, Environment.
The specific parameters within each area are described as follows:
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