Can We Create More Meaningful City Rankings?
They seem to be coming out at an ever-increasing pace: rankings of cities and nations based on how livable they are, or how bicycle friendly, or how green and happy,
put together by various advocacy groups, think tanks and magazines. The
media loves to pick these up, and let's face it, they're fun. But as
Alex Steffen points out in a post today on WorldChanging, they can sometimes be counterproductive.
Such
rankings typically use reams of data to make their lists, and all those
numbers give them each an appearance of objective authority (although
in the case of magazines, the bias is usually more evident, as in Monocle's picks for its well-heeled readership). But the data selected make all the difference. Happiness is to an extent in the eye of the beholder.
Seattle: Not as green as it looks? Photo by mandj98 via Flickr.Steffen takes issue with the list recently released by the Natural Resources Defense Council as part of its Smarter Cities project, whose overall mission he applauds. (The list
had me scratching my head a bit when it came out, in part because it
scores Los Angeles ahead of New York in the transportation category.)
They've put Seattle in first place overall, and Steffen, who lives
there, isn't having it:
I've explained before why I'm skeptical of city rankings to begin with:
what's
measured by these rankings tends not to be a good set of indicators of
whether these cities as a whole are actually improving in any
meaningful way. And Smarter Cities in particular seems to have gotten
the wires crossed between its excellent mission and its flawed
measurements.Seattle,
for instance, comes in at #1 in the rankings. Living in Seattle, I feel
no qualms about probing into how a city with profound sustainability
problems managed to make it to the top of a national ranking for "smart
cities." I can tell you it ain't pretty.Though
sustainability itself is a somewhat slippery concept, there are
absolutely standards by which we can judge progress, as they mean the
same things everywhere, and are pretty good measurements of overall
impact. What, for instance, are a city's per capita greenhouse gas
emissions? How many miles a day do its citizens drive? How large is
their average home and how compact are their communities? How much
water do they use? How much energy? How much solid waste do they
generate? These sorts of numbers actually tell us something about how
the people live, and about their overall levels of impact.But Smarter Cities counts more easily measured, but sort of pointless data.…
[For
instance,] "energy production and conservation" was rated by solely by
the percentage of green power sources for its electricity, not total
direct energy usage (much less total embedded energy usage). This means
that a city like Seattle -- with a highly auto-dependent population,
which wastes more or less about as much energy as other Americans (more
than the average Californian, and far more than the average German or
Japanese) -- looks great, because of the region's abundance of
hydropower, while in fact not being particularly ahead of the curve in
any other way. We happen to have rain and mountains, so we're "green,"
never mind the landfills full of dead appliances and the smog hanging in the sky.
Why should we care? Steffen continues:
Thepoint here is not to pick on Smarter Cities (or Seattle). The pointhere is that unless we start defining real success (and measuring ourprogress in light of it), comparative measurements are worse thanuseless: they can even become a form of greenwashing. Many, forinstance, argue that Seattle's environmental performance (when you takeaway the hydro and the mild climate) is actually sub-par, but theaccolades of others make it hard to hold elected officials feet to thefire over this city's lack of density, low standards and continuingauto-dependence.
I look forward to a city ranking that doesthe opposite: that makes it easier for individuals to measure their ownefforts, easier for citizens to judge progress, and easier for citiesto set goals that might in fact make them truly bright green place tolive. A truly smarter city would judge itself not by its neighbors, butby what'sneeded to save the planet.
Interesting
stuff. Do any of you have examples of rankings that you find
contradicted by your personal knowledge or experience? I, for instance,
was surprised to see Mississippi ranked 24th
in bicycle-friendliness by the League of American Bicyclists. My
in-laws live there, and I've traveled to many different parts of the
state several times. Over the course of a recent ten-day stay during
the most beautiful part of springtime, I saw fewer than a dozen people
riding bicycles. And when I passed a "Share the Road" sign for
bicyclists, it was unusual enough that I stopped to take a picture of
it.
More from around the network: Hard Drive
reports on the open source philosophy of Portland's TriMet transit
agency, which has made independently produced iPhone apps available at
its website. Hugh Bartling
looks at a new book by Forbes writer Christopher Steiner called "$20
Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will
Change Our Lives For the Better." And Austin on Two Wheels posts on a proposed bikeshare system that would add power back to the grid.
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