Overview
ISO 37100:2016 - Sustainable cities and communities - Vocabulary provides a harmonized set of terms and definitions used in the context of sustainable urban and territorial development. The standard covers language for sustainable development, resilience, smart community infrastructure (intelligence) and associated management, quality, indicators and infrastructure topics. As a vocabulary standard, ISO 37100:2016 does not prescribe technical solutions; it standardizes terminology to ensure consistent interpretation across policies, projects and other standards.
Key Topics
ISO 37100 organizes terms across core topic groups (clause references from the standard):
- Development, resilience and intelligence (3.1): definitions of sustainability, development durable, resilience, intelligence, ecosystem services, environmental impact, life cycle and life‑cycle cost.
- Organisms, cities and communities (3.2): definitions for city, community, organization, buyer, supplier and interested parties (stakeholders).
- Management (3.3): system of management, leadership/direction, policy, objectives, continuous improvement, documented information, outsourcing and processes.
- Quality, conformity, indicators and measurement (3.4–3.5): terminology to support performance measurement and compliance (as indicated in the table of contents).
- Infrastructure and services (3.6): vocabulary for territorial infrastructure and service delivery (scope listing).
Important referenced notions include: ecosystem, services écosystémiques (ecosystem services), impact, cycle de vie, coût du cycle de vie, catastrophe naturelle, and distinctions between déchet dangereux and déchet solide.
Practical Applications and Users
ISO 37100:2016 is used wherever consistent terminology is critical to planning, governance and implementation of sustainable-community initiatives:
- Municipal governments and local authorities drafting sustainability policies, plans and procurement criteria.
- Urban planners, sustainability officers and resilience managers aligning cross-department work.
- Consultants, NGOs and academics preparing reports, indicators or comparative studies on cities and communities.
- Smart-city solution providers and infrastructure planners to align technical specifications with commonly understood terms.
- Standards developers and auditors who need clear, shared definitions when referencing related management or environmental standards.
Benefits include improved communication, clearer contracts and procurement documents, consistent indicator frameworks and reduced ambiguity in multi-stakeholder projects.
Related Standards
ISO 37100 references and aligns terminology with other ISO/IEC documents and guides, for example:
- ISO 14001:2015 (environmental terms referenced)
- ISO 26000:2010 (social responsibility / impact)
- ISO 13065:2015 (ecosystem-related terms)
- ISO/IEC/IEEE 24765 and ISO/IEC 15944-1 (life‑cycle and procurement terms)
- ISO guides cited (Guide ISO 82, Guide ISO 73)
- ISO Online Browsing Platform and IEC Electropedia are recommended terminological resources.
Using ISO 37100:2016 helps ensure consistent, searchable and SEO‑friendly language across documentation for sustainable cities and communities.
