Culture is an essential yet often overlooked aspect of sustainable urban development. Historically, sustainable development has been framed around economic, social, and environmental dimensions, with culture treated as secondary. Back when the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were being created, the #Culture2015Goal campaign sought to integrate culture as an SDG, and while the SDGs do acknowledge culture’s role in education, economic growth, sustainable consumption, and sustainable cities, culture remains absent as a stand-alone goal.  

Why Must Culture Be at the Heart of Sustainable Urban Development is a policy paper commissioned by the United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Committee on Culture arguing that culture is critical for fostering social cohesion, economic resilience, and inclusive development. And this paper identifies numerous difficulties surrounding the intentional development of cultural infrastructure.  Cultural policies are often deprioritized in favor of tangible economic and infrastructure projects. There is also a prevailing belief that culture will sustain itself without investment, and unlike economic indicators like GDP or employment rates, cultural metrics are harder to standardize and harder to measure, making them difficult to integrate into policy frameworks and sustainable urban planning.

A key challenge in cultural sustainability is that it resists simple quantification. Culture is often seen as intangible, but meaningful proxies—such as the distribution of cultural institutions—can provide valuable insights. If culture is to be effectively integrated into policymaking, we must explore methods to measure it systematically.  Since the early 2000s, there has been a worldwide movement towards open government data, and many large metropolitan areas across the world like New York, Toronto, London, Barcelona, Mexico City, and even Tempe, AZ have launched comprehensive open data portals, providing detailed records on public transit, cultural institutions, business activity, infrastructure, and even public art. These resources allow for unprecedented opportunities to analyze cultural infrastructure through GIS and spatial analytics.

This track aims to bridge the gap by utilizing GIS tools and open city data to systematically map cultural infrastructure. By mapping cultural assets such as museums, theaters, libraries, and creative hubs, we hope to identify patterns, being able to highlight cultural hubs and underserved areas and to examine how cultural infrastructure intersects with economic growth, public health, and social equity. The ultimate goal is that these models can offer insights that can inform data-driven policies that embed cultural vitality within broader sustainability policies.