Towards a Standardized Framework: Analyzing and Systematizing Urban Sustainability Indicators to Guide Effective City Development

Urban sustainability has become a central theme in contemporary city planning and pol-icy-making, reflecting the growing need to address complex environmental, social, and economic challenges. However, the range of metrics used to measure sustainability often results in fragmentation and inconsistency, limiting their practical application. The pre-sent study aims to analyze and systematize the urban sustainability indicators most commonly found in literature and employed at the international level. The research seeks to develop a comprehensive framework of economic, environmental, and social indica-tors, providing a more coherent and standardized tool to support informed and effective urban regeneration strategies. In particular, in this work a critical examination of the in-dicators is carried out, highlighting inherent limitations, potential distortions, and the standardizability level. To ensure more reliable and transparent measurement tools, the outcome of the analysis is the definition of a structured abacus of key urban sustainability indicators, classified across three main domains (economic, environmental, and social), able to orient the choices processes to promote sustainable cities development.