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Cities today are dense networks of interchanging investments, information, goods and people, as well as centers of innovation and knowledge management. In such a complex framework of housing, social and economic interrelationships, cities become large consumers of resources and producers of greenhouse gases. Therefore, and in order to preserve resources and guarantee social services and the well-being of citizens, planning and policy actions are required that contribute to achieving sustainable growth. Beyond the environmental perspective, a socio-economic analysis is essential to make a comprehensive sustainability diagnosis of urban and rural systems. This paper presents a methodology for sustainability assessment, based on 38 indicators that include the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic and environmental. To carry out this assessment, 64 municipalities out of 313 located in Galicia (Northwest Spain) were selected and classified in three categories according to their population size (Medium Size, Small Size and Village). Moreover, two weighting methods have been considered (equal weighting and measured weighting attributed through Analytic Hierarchy Process method). The results show that most sustainable municipalities are located in the north of the region. On the other hand, regardless of the weighting method, 57% of the medium-sized municipalities are rated sustainable compared to 45% of those of the categories of Village and Small Size categories. Therefore, municipal size is relevant for measuring sustainability and there are no significant differences between the results obtained with the two weighting methodologies, indicating that the method developed is robust and could be applied to other municipalities and cities. Image 1 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a context of expansion and development of the tourism sector worldwide, assessing the tourism sustainability performance of regions or countries becomes an important goal of strategic planning as a means to ensure an appropriate balance between present and future opportunities of areas with a tourism-based economy. Due to the multidimensional nature of the sustainability concept and the difficulties encountered in its measurement, composite indicators have increasingly been used as useful tools for the operationalization of sustainability. In this paper the study of tourism sustainability of Spanish regions is addressed by building a composite indicator that uses multicriteria decision techniques for the aggregation and weighting of the simple indicators considered. The developed index allows the representation of both the weak and strong sustainability paradigms, as well as other compromising, midway concepts between those. Moreover, the sustainability performance of the studied regions can be easily compared and a fair ranking of the regions can accordingly be obtained, which can serve as a starting point that stimulates public and private debate and promotes improvement actions to achieve sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]