Set targets and indicators

Step 6 of 12 Strategy Development

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The agreed vision and objectives say where the area wants to go. This step makes that ambition measurable. A target fixes how far and by when, and an indicator is the thing you will actually measure to know whether you are getting there. Without them a plan cannot be steered while it runs or judged once it ends, and the baseline you fixed earlier has nothing to be compared against. The task here is to turn each objective into a small set of clear targets and the indicators that track them.

Before you start this step you should already have

The vision statements and objectives as residents and the coalition actually signed off on them, not as an earlier draft had them.

For each objective, the priority group it serves and the baseline gap it is aimed at, since a target with neither attached cannot be set at a defensible level.

A clear list of the data you can already populate and how it was collected because an indicator you cannot measure again in three years is not an indicator.

From objective to target to indicator

SUMP treats this as a single chain. An objective states a direction, such as bringing daily destinations within reach without a car. An indicator is the measurable quantity that reflects movement in that direction, such as the share of residents who can reach a grocery on foot. A target adds a value and a deadline to the indicator, turning "improve grocery access" into "raise it from today's level to a defined level by a defined year". Each link in that chain has to hold. An objective with no indicator cannot be tracked, and an indicator with no target gives you a reading but no standard to read it against.

The DREAMS impact-assessment framework, set out in Deliverable 6.1, first organised this around six impact areas, and the evaluation framework of the decision support tool in Deliverable 3.3 adds governance as a seventh. Each area answers one challenge typical of the outskirts with one strategic objective. They are the headings under which a 15-minute plan in the outskirts is most usefully measured.

The seven impact areas

Accessibility

Whether residents can reach the everyday destinations that matter, on foot, by bike or by public transport. The core 15-minute measure, and the one MinuteMap is built to track directly.

Carbon emissions

The greenhouse gas emissions of everyday travel, and how much a measure saves by shifting trips out of the car. Often estimated from the car journeys a new service is shown to replace.

Liveability

The quality and attractiveness of the neighbourhood itself, meaning public space recovered from traffic, lower noise, and how pleasant the area is to spend time in.

Health

The physical activity that walking and cycling bring, alongside cleaner air and safer streets. Closely tied to how far people will travel under their own power.

Economic impact

The effect on the local economy and on budgets, from footfall for local shops to the viability of a new service and who carries the cost. Name who bears each cost, not only the total.

Equity

How access and impacts are shared across groups. A neighbourhood average can look healthy while the residents who depend most on proximity are left behind.

Governance

Who takes part in shaping the plan, whether residents feel their input changed anything, and whether the measures win public acceptance. Where responsibility is split across several authorities, it is also what lets delivery hold together.

These seven areas describe what a 15-minute plan is trying to change. They sit alongside the seven features you used to read your outskirt, its density, diversity, design, governance, business models and human perspective. Those describe the place you start from, while the impact areas describe the difference you are setting out to make. Not all seven will carry equal weight in your plan, and Deliverable 6.1 is honest that they were not equally represented across the living labs either, because each area only matters as much as the measures you are testing make it matter.

Choosing indicators that fit your area

A long indicator list is not a virtue. The art of this step is picking a short set that genuinely tracks your objectives and that you can actually populate with data. DREAMS screened its candidate indicators on three questions, and the same three work for any city.

The first is sensitivity. Will the indicator move if your plan succeeds? An indicator that barely responds to the measures you are planning tells you nothing about them. DREAMS found, for instance, that conventional walkability and cyclability indices reacted only weakly to the kind of new mobility services the labs were testing, so they were poor choices for judging those measures.

The second is relevance. Does the indicator reflect what your residents actually need, and in particular the groups your diagnosis singled out? An indicator that matters to a consultant but not to the people living there will not hold attention or drive decisions.

The third is measurability. Can you collect or model the data behind it, at the spatial and temporal scale your evaluation works at, within the budget and timeframe you have? An indicator you cannot populate is an intention, not a measure.

Two practical disciplines round this out. Keep the set small, on the order of ten to twelve indicators rather than fifty, so the team and your stakeholders can keep the whole picture in view. And watch for overlap, so the same effect is not counted twice under two headings, for example listing both carbon emissions and a broader environmental impact that already contains them. Cover the negative effects as honestly as the positive ones, since a measure that helps one group can burden another, and an indicator set that only looks for good news will miss exactly the trade-offs this step exists to surface.

Set the target around the least-served, not the average

A neighbourhood that looks well served on a textbook standard can fall sharply once you measure it for the people who depend on proximity most. A target pinned to the area average will be met long before those residents see any difference. Frame the headline target around the worst-served group and around real choice, two or three groceries within reach rather than a single one, and the plan stays aimed at the gap it is meant to close.

Keep the full framework in view

DREAMS built its indicators in two layers, and the split is worth copying. The first is a general framework of 34 indicators describing what a 15-minute plan in the outskirts should ideally track, chosen without regard to the data any one city holds. The second is the 19 indicators the project could actually measure across its living labs, kept because partners judged them relevant, sensitive to the interventions and measurable within a pilot (Deliverable 3.3). Each living lab then added indicators of its own for the particular measures it tested.

The working set covers the seven areas unevenly. Accessibility and equity are well served, because the accessibility model and the resident surveys reach them directly. Health has no shared indicator at all, not because it matters less but because a short local pilot cannot detect a change in physical activity or air quality. A plan that keeps only its working set quietly drops whatever it cannot measure this year. Keep the full framework beside it, so the areas you are not yet tracking stay visible and can be picked up once a longer monitoring period or better data allows.

Read the results area by area rather than folding them into one composite score. The areas pull against each other. Accessibility gains can concentrate among residents who were already well served, and a more attractive neighbourhood can push up housing costs, so a single index would let a gain in one area hide a loss in another.

One area often leads - equity in Overvecht

In several living labs a single impact area dominated the local objective, and that is what shaped the indicators. The clearest case is Overvecht in Utrecht, where the lab was framed around migrants and low-income households from the start. Measured against a normative 15-minute standard the district scores a multi-amenity compliance of 0.71, which looks respectable. Measured with the preferences of its low-income residents, that figure falls to 0.55, a drop driven mostly by poor walking access to grocery stores and pharmacies, the very amenities those households weight most highly. For a plan with an equity objective, the meaningful indicator is plainly the compliance figure for low-income residents, not the district average, and the target has to be set against that lower number. These per-group accessibility figures come from Deliverable 3.1.

The pattern repeats elsewhere with different areas in the lead. In Rákosmente near Budapest, where the objective centred on shared micromobility and reducing car use, the workshop indicators that emerged were carbon saved, kilometres travelled and the share of car trips a bike-sharing service could realistically substitute. Reading how a comparable lab translated its main objective into a handful of concrete indicators is a fast way to draft your own.

Setting your own targets and indicators

The sequence is the same whether you use the DREAMS framework or your own. Start from your agreed objectives and, for each, decide which of the seven impact areas it falls under. Choose at most a couple of indicators per objective that pass the sensitivity, relevance and measurability test, leaning on indicators you can already populate from your baseline. Attach a target to each, a direction, a level and a year, and where equity matters set that target against the group the gap hits hardest rather than the average. Record the data source, the method and the measurement frequency next to each indicator now, while the reasoning is fresh because these are precisely what the monitoring step will pick up again.

Stakeholder-based Impact Scoring

For weighing targets and trade-offs with several stakeholder groups who value the impact areas differently, gives each group a structured way to rate how an option performs against the indicators that matter to them.

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Go deeper

Monitoring and Evaluation Kit (CH4LLENGE, EU project)

A full practitioner manual on choosing indicators, setting baselines and building a monitoring plan, one of four SUMP kits and the one written for exactly this step.

Urban mobility indicator fiches (European Commission)

Define the calculation method and data needs for seven indicators, among them access to mobility services and modal share, which urban nodes collect under the revised TEN-T Regulation.

Sources and further information

EU SUMP Guidelines, Second Edition (Rupprecht Consult, 2019), Step 6, Set targets and indicators.

DREAMS Deliverable 6.1: the impact assessment framework, the first six impact areas and the indicator selection criteria.

DREAMS Deliverable 2.1: the seven dimensions for reading an urban outskirt.

DREAMS Deliverable 3.1: the per-group multi-amenity compliance figures for Overvecht.

DREAMS Deliverable 3.3: the seven strategic objectives and impact areas, the general evaluation framework and the overarching KPIs.

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