Tag Archives: indicators

The Programmable City team delivered four papers at the Conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Tampa, April 8-12. Here are the slides for Kitchin, R., Lauriault, T. and McArdle, G. (2014). “Urban indicators, city benchmarking, and real-time dashboards: Knowing and governing cities through open and big data” delivered in the session “Thinking the ‘smart city’: power, politics and networked urbanism II” organized by Taylor Shelton and Alan Wiig. The paper is a work in progress and was the first attempt at presenting work that is presently being written up for submission to a journal. No doubt it’ll evolve over time, but the central argument should hold.

Interactive city benchmarking sites

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Over the past few years there have been a proliferation of city benchmarking indexes and data tools that enable the comparison of different phenomenon across cities. A recent Jones Lang LaSalle report details 150 of them. Such indexes are composed of composites of key indicators and are proported to give an indication of city performance vis-a-vis other locales and to judge how city administrations and policies are fairing. Below are some links to some interactive city benchmarking sites that allow the comparison of selected cities. Our interests in such benchmarking is in the politics of indicator selection and the formulation of indices, and how the data are employed, a topic that we’ve just started to examine on the ProgCity project.

NYC Global Innovation Exchange: http://www.nyc.gov/html/ia/gprb/html/global/global.shtml