The best and the brightest: city rankings and indices
The Greenest, the most competitive, the safest, the most bicycle-friendly city and many more. Everyone has come across lists or rankings of cities; they are easy to understand, convey strong messages and attract a lot of media attention. But is it that easy? Read what you should know when reading the next city ranking!
We naturally appeal to these kind of lists and rankings because they turn complex issues into simple numbers that allow us to compare London, Paris and Madrid by looking at a score for which someone else has made some complext calculation. During the summer, I was an Academic Visitor at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C. in addition to other projects I analyzed roughly 30 urban indices and rankings and tried to understand their methodology, their coverage and their results.
This work started in the light of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that for the first time include specific urban goals and made us wonder about measuring urban goals. This eventually led to a few of the best known urban indices the Mercer Quality of Living Study and the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Livability Ranking. When I further explored the topic, I discovered an incredible number and diversity of studies and reports that produced rankings and indices of cities and decided to dig deeper.
I found several interesting trends and came across some interesting questions that I want to discuss here in a small series of blog posts. The first is co-edited with my former colleague from the Urban Institute and tries to give food for thought on simplest of all questions: What defines a city? Insiders will know that there is a longstanding debate about how to define the city and we do not want to resolve this debate in a blog post but we try to show why it is important to think about how New York, Paris or London are defined in rankings.
Are we referring to the five boroughs of London and the twenty Parisian arrondissements or to a functional definitions that is based on commuting zones? We know that suburbs and city centres are not home to the same type of people and do not have the same level of economic activity or the same GDP per capita. Why should we care about that? Given the wide spread in the media, such rankings will eventually impact policy making and agenda setting to some extent. Therefore it is important that readers of such rankings think critically about what is being measured and do not take results for granted.