Quality of life and international standardization in the field of sustainable development of communities

Public authorities, international organizations and non-profit associations are nowadays working on identifying and solving the problems of various communities (i.e., towns, villages and other administrative-territorial units) through the development of specialized programs. Sustainable development projects in rural or urban areas are flourishing all around the world today. Nevertheless stakeholders are confused because there are no international consensus on the evaluation of the above projects and therefore there is a need in the development of the international standards on sustainable development and resilience in communities. In order to efficiently organize the works on benchmarking and standardization in the field of sustainable development the relevant technical committee has been established: ISO/TC 268 "Sustainable development in communities". Among the current priorities of the TC is the development of a common "language" for all stakeholders in terms of unified terminology and thereby contribute to greater clarity and harmonization in this field. ISO/TC 268 will focus on the development of a management system standard, ISO 37101, 'Management systems ? General principles and requirements'. Successful implementation of requirements of the above standard will allow communities to increase the quality of their activities and management, as well as to encourage the interested parties to get involved in the process of improvement. It will enable communities to develop a strategy for ensuring sustainable development and resilience, establish objectives and processes to fulfill obligations and taking actions to improve performance. Another standard under development on the TC's agenda is ISO 37120, "Global city indicators for city services and quality of life", which will allow harmonization of performance indicators in the relevant fields. Having implemented such standard the cities will be able to share their experience and knowledge in a consistent way. Besides, comparative analyses will allow them to assess the respective performance levels and thus encourage a healthy competitive spirit. ISO/TC 268 includes a subcommittee dealing with the urban infrastructures, SC 1, "Smart community infrastructures", with two preliminary items already included in its work program: ISO/TR 37150, a technical report on smart urban infrastructures around the world, which will serve as a basis for the development of the future ISO 37151 standard on harmonized metrics for benchmarking smartness of infrastructures. ISO/TC 268 will thus lay the foundations for an international consensus on principles and approaches that each "community" will be further able to adapt considering its own needs and specificities.