# Indicators are not going to save us. Against reductionism

Sustainability indicators for metropolitan contexts have always been subject to critical review, as they have to refer to complex systems. For example, the Stanford Social Innovation Review article entitled ***“After Big Data: The Coming Age of Big Indicators”*** writes about the difficulty of dealing with **super-wicked problems**. In 2017 there were other many comments on the ineffectiveness of the indicators proposed by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) because it is difficult to implement them directly at the local scale. Why? The indicators are explicitly configured as “to generate knowledge… and communicate about complex issues” to bring together experts and non-experts. This is done by measuring the approximations of the essential elements of the concept. Otherwise not measurable. (Concept expressed in: ***Turnhout, E., Hisschemöller, M., & Eijsackers, H. (2007). Ecological indicators: Between the two fires of science and policy. Ecological Indicators, 7(2), 215–228***). The reductionist aspect (short and simple) has been paradoxically criticized.

For example, GDP is universally considered as an indicator of prosperity for a Country and certainly one of the most reductive about economy. Policymakers love it but it’s critically reductive to read the complexity of the system’s relationships. In 1969 Jay Forrester, with the aim of creating a computational model of the city, wrote the text Urban Dynamics including the idea of multi-dimensionality. In order to achieve this, he has looked for a balance between the main components, focusing on the study of the system’s boundaries (***closed-system boundaries***). **These do not reduce the number of indicators, but on one hand allow them to be better identified starting from the dynamics** (which for him are Level [state] variables representing accumulations within the feedback loop and Rare [flow] variables representing activity within the feedback loops).

***

18 julho 2018