The role of comparative city policy data in assessing progress toward the urban SDG targets

As part of the UN Sustainable Development Goals, all countries have agreed to“make cities and human set-tlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. We argue that there is a critical need for large-scale com-parative city policy data that, when linked with outcome data, could be used to identify where policies areworking and where they could be improved. In an assessment of the landscape of existing city policy data, basedon a comprehensive scoping review, wefind that existing databases are insufficient for the purposes of com-parative analysis. We then describe what an“ideal”city policy database would look like, where it could behoused, and how it could be developed. Such a database could be a key tool for achieving SDG 11, the urbanSustainable Development Goa