SDG 11 Beyond the index: Are we evaluating cities or merely measuring them?

By Yuanyuan Zang & Cheng Wang

EvalYouth China

SDG 11 gives cities sixteen indicators to track urban sustainability — yet a decade into implementation, informal settlements persist, and displacement continues. In this blog, we ask an uncomfortable question: has SDG 11's measurement framework become a ceiling on ambition rather than a floor for action? Drawing on Guangzhou's decade-long effort to extend public housing access, we show one example of how a city can move from perfunctory compliance to genuine inclusion and push further and ask: in your city, what does standard measurement fail to capture? Who remains present but uncounted? What institutional responses have been deferred — and what would it take to finally begin?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFm6tlRAjss

There is a paradox at the heart of global urban sustainability: the more comprehensively we try to measure it, the less political momentum we seem to muster to govern it. SDG 11, which commits to inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable cities, is one of the most ambitious goals in the 2030 Agenda — tracked through 16 indicators spanning housing, transport, cultural heritage, disaster risk, air quality, and rural-urban linkages [1]. Yet the crises it was designed to prevent continue to persist: informal settlements grow, displacement accelerates, and climate shocks outpace urban resilience. A decade into implementation, the more pressing question is no longer how comprehensively we are measuring — but what we are fundamentally doing to address these issues.

The problem, we argue, runs deeper than a lack of monitoring tools or political will. When cities are evaluated through a fixed set of visible indicators, they begin to optimize for what is measurable rather than what is meaningful — and the framework meant to guide urban sustainability quietly becomes a ceiling on ambition. Real cities function as dynamic ecosystems where housing, labor mobility, and climate resilience are inseparable; a framework that treats them as isolated entries does not just fail to capture urban complexity, it actively narrows the vision of what better cities could look like.

This problem is self-reinforcing. Top-down policy directives and bottom-up implementation challenges feed into each other, creating a feedback loop that breeds inertia. As Simon et al. (2016) caution, when SDG indicators fail to align with the policy agendas of local authorities, reporting compliance risks can drift toward becoming an end in itself rather than a stimulus for meaningful urban sustainability transitions — a dynamic that is especially pronounced where institutional capacity is already strained [2]. What the decade of implementation since 2015 has revealed is not that this problem has been resolved — but rather that we now understand far more clearly the implementation challenges accumulating across country-specific contexts, and what the actual problem entails.

At the top-down policy level, the indicator architecture still treats the inherently cross-cutting agenda of sustainable urbanization as a series of isolated entries. Without coordinated land use planning (SDG 11.3), improved transport accessibility (SDG 11.2) can fuel urban sprawl; without tracking displaced residents, reporting slum reduction (SDG 11.1) can mask deepening exclusion. The pursuit of global comparability systematically underweighs these interdependencies further. When these universal indicators confront the administrative hierarchies and statistical systems of different countries, they may prove ill-suited for purpose.

At the bottom-up implementation level, where monitoring meets governance, three structural bottlenecks compound these top-down failures: 

1. Traditional methods relying on censuses, sample surveys, and administrative registrations function like expensive snapshots of a fluid city, forever lagging behind evolving realities;

2. Indicators remain fragmented across data sources, methodologies, and statistical units, making it impossible to track distributional dynamics or learn across cities;

3. Knowledge and action remain persistently decoupled: indicators accumulate in annual reports rather than informing the planning decisions and investment sequences that actually shape urban trajectories.

   
   

From "compliance competition" to "confronting paradoxes": Lessons from Guangzhou

The experience of megacities in the Global South further illustrates these limitations on an unprecedented scale. Taking Guangzhou—one of the world's most dynamic migrant-receiving cities—as an example, its urban renewal tells a story of significant physical progress. By 2025, the city had mobilized massive investments in renovating old residential communities and improving urban infrastructure (Guangzhou Municipal Government, 2026) [3]. If measured strictly against the "physical indicators" of SDG 11—such as the volume of housing supply and infrastructure resilience—Guangzhou represents a narrative of remarkable compliance. 

However, this "numerical success" also brought the city to a critical "wall of conflict between indicators and reality" earlier than most. As a megacity, by 2020, Guangzhou's usual resident population had reached 18.68 million — of whom roughly half were classified as part of the floating population, broadly referring to residents living in Guangzhou away from their place of household registration. (Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, 2021) [4][5]. This demographic reality is also a governance challenge. Without local registration, this population faces systematic barriers to accessing publicly provided welfare, and housing is where that exclusion is felt most acutely. Recent research drawing on Guangzhou survey data constructs a Housing Precarity Index (HPI) across six dimensions — tenure security, housing affordability, housing quality, commuting burden, access to public education and healthcare, and access to surrounding living facilities — and finds that the inability to access public rental housing leaves young low- and middle-income renters significantly more exposed across all of these dimensions simultaneously (Chen et al., 2026) [6]. Housing, in this framework, is not merely shelter: it is the entry point into the city's broader social infrastructure.

The significance of Guangzhou’s case lies in its proactive shift toward "governing areas invisible to indicators”. Recognizing that social sustainability cannot be achieved through physical construction alone, Guangzhou initiated a series of iterative reforms. Since 2016-17, Guangzhou has progressively opened its public rental housing system to non-registered residents, allocating a substantial share of its housing security resources specifically to migrants — a meaningful departure from the local-registration-tied allocation logic that has historically governed urban welfare. Strikingly, evidence suggests this approach achieves genuine inclusion: once inside public rental housing, migrants experience reductions in housing precarity comparable to, and in some service-access dimensions more pronounced than, those of local residents — because access to public housing grants migrants equal entry into services from which they would otherwise be institutionally excluded (Chen et al., 2026) [6].

Taken together, these reforms suggest a city willing to name the institutional contradictions embedded in its own system — and to build policy responses around them. In its most recent steps, Guangzhou further extended housing security to newly employed non-registered workers (Guangzhou Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau, 2025) [7] and promoted equalization of education and healthcare access regardless of registration status (Guangzhou Daily, 2026) [8].

Beyond measurement, toward inclusive urban governance

These are not finished stories — and that incompleteness is precisely what makes them valuable. What Guangzhou's experience ultimately demonstrates is a particular governance mindset: identify the constraint blocking inclusion, name it honestly, and build an institutional response — rather than waiting for a perfect monitoring framework to tell them what to optimize.

The broader challenge for the global evaluation community mirrors Guangzhou's experience. As assessment frameworks grow more sophisticated, the more pressing question may not be how to measure more precisely, but how to adequately integrate evaluation into implementation — moving beyond principles to identify the specific binding constraints that limit people's welfare in particular places. The bottleneck is rarely universal; it is embedded in local institutions, histories, and political economies that aggregate indicators, by design, were never built to surface.

We close not with a transferable model but with a provocation. SDG 11 will not be achieved by cities that build more; it will be achieved by cities that govern better, for everyone within them. So we leave you with the questions that should precede any indicator under SDG 11: in your city, what does standard measurement not capture? Who is present but uncounted? What institutional response has been deferred? And what would it take to begin?

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Yuanyuan Zang is a member of EvalYouth China and the 7th Cohort of the Horizon Global Youth Development Program. She focuses on global brand communication, advancing sustainable impact. She previously served as an Urban Designer at Surbana Jurong from 2021 to 2023, specializing in community development and sustainable master planning.

Cheng Wang is the Founder of EvalYouth China and a master’s in public administration / international development candidate at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a member of the 6th cohort of the Horizon Global Youth Development Program. He previously served as a Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist at UNDP from 2022 to 2025. Connect with Cheng Wang on LinkedIn.

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AI Disclaimer: This blog was researched and written with the assistance of AI tools. All ideas, analysis, and editorial decisions reflect the authors' own thinking; AI was used solely to support the research process.

References

[1] United Nations Statistics Division. “SDG Indicators Metadata Repository: Goal 11. Make Cities and Human Settlements Inclusive, Safe, Resilient and Sustainable.” SDG Indicators, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/?Goal=11 

[2] Simon, David, et al. “Developing and Testing the Urban Sustainable Development Goal's Targets and Indicators: A Five-City Study.” Environment and Urbanization, vol. 28, no. 1, 2016, pp. 49–63. SAGE Publications, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956247815619865

[3] Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. “Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Housing and Urban-Rural Development 2025 Work Summary and 2026 Work Plan.” Guangzhou Municipal Government, 12 Feb. 2026,

[4] Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, and Office of the Leading Group of the Seventh National Population Census of Guangzhou. “Guangzhou Seventh National Population Census Bulletin (No. 1): Situation of City’s Permanent Population.” 18 May 2021.

[5] Guangzhou Municipal Bureau of Statistics, and Office of the Leading Group of the Seventh National Population Census of Guangzhou. “Guangzhou Seventh National Population Census Bulletin (No. 6): Urban-Rural Population and Floating Population.” 18 May 2021.

[6] Chen, L., et al. “Does Access to Public Rental Housing Alleviate Housing Precarity among Young Low- and Middle-Income Renters? Evidence from Guangzhou, China.” Cities, vol. 171, 2026, article 106780. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2026.106780

[7] Guangzhou Municipal Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau. "Notice on Extending the Validity of the Guangzhou Public Rental Housing Security Measures for Newly Employed Housing-less Workers". Guangzhou Municipal People's Government Portal, 20 Dec. 2024, www.gz.gov.cn/gfxwj/sbmgfxwj/gzszfhcxjsj/content/post_10038128.html. Effective 1 Mar. 2025.

[8] Guangzhou Daily. Guangzhou Uses 'Small Breakthroughs' to Drive 'Big Changes': A New Vision for People's Livelihoods. Guangzhou Municipal People's Government Portal, 22 Jan. 2026, www.gz.gov.cn/zt/gzlfzgzld/gzgzlfz/content/post_10657232.html.

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