New report decodes global city rankings

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an organisation that promotes discourse on global issues, has launched a new report which breaks down the history, differences and methodologies of the many existing city rankings into an easy-to-understand roadmap.

“We decided to produce this report as we have seen too many rankings and not enough context,” Michele Wucker, Vice President of Studies at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told Cities Today. “Global rankings can be useful tools, but only if people know how to use them and what’s behind them. We wanted to help city leaders use these rankings to develop targeted policies based on their city’s individual strengths and weaknesses.”

The report, Beyond the Scorecard: Understanding Global City Rankings, is not itself a tool for evaluating cities but an analysis of select city rankings. The report illustrates how methodologies, definitions, data use and conclusions vary wildly from ranking to ranking, and notes biases and challenges common to many indexes, including the author’s perspective, lack of reliable and internationally comparable data and the routine presence of lagging indicators. It also outlines practices to help policymakers navigate through the noise to find insights and trends depending on what kind of information they need.

“Using rankings simply to determine which city is ‘best’ overall often obscures a city’s performance in many areas crucial to defining a global city,” said Ivo Daalder, President of The Chicago Council. “Rather than taking a panoramic view, the Chicago Forum will leverage the experience and insights of leading luminaries from more than 20 countries to take a deeper dive into the different strengths, as well as challenges, of today’s global cities.”

The Council hopes the report will help inform discussion and debate about how global cities can be the vanguards of change when civic, business, cultural and education leaders from around the world converge in Chicago for the inaugural Chicago Forum on Global Cities between 27-29 May 2015.

“We think city officials can still learn a lot from the rankings about their city’s performance in relation to other global cities,” added Wucker. “The nature of rankings are comparative, and once leaders understand the underlying indicators and factors related to their rank they can look to their peers for guidance on creating effective policies to improve their performance.”