8/25/2023 How do the indicators used by a city of metropolitan region differ from the global indicatorsRead NowMcCarney says her group chose to focus solely on municipal statistics that correspond to existing municipal boundaries. The project has posed all sorts of methodological challenges, not least of which is settling on a precise definition of the term “city.” Metropolitan areas and urban agglomerations, especially those experiencing high growth, tend to spill over political boundaries. McCarney – who travels extensively to promote the project – is aiming to reach the 1,000-city mark in time for Milan’s 2015 Expo on sustainable development. Two years after the launch of the Global City facility, McCarney’s team tracks more than 100 indicators and has signed up 125 cities of all sizes and from every part of the world, from Dallas to Kabul. The project has the backing of the World Bank, whose officials have pushed for more reliable data to support its lending in heavily urbanized regions, such as Latin America. It was this sort of thinking that led to the creation of the Global City Indicators Facility, a database of comparable statistics that allow cities to track their effectiveness on everything from planning and economic growth to transportation, safety and education. By exchanging knowledge about best practices, she says, cities can improve their quality of life and attractiveness to international investors. With this ongoing shift, says Patricia McCarney, a development expert at the Munk School of Global Affairs, city officials worldwide are anxious to learn how their counterparts elsewhere deliver vital local services, from water treatment to transit, policing and garbage collection. The upshot is that local governments will become ever more crucial players in global affairs, perhaps even eclipsing their regional or national counterparts. Even wealthy cities increasingly suffer from a widening gap between the very rich and the very poor. At the same time, growing urbanization in developing nations is exacerbating problems of poverty, congestion and pollution. A World Bank study in 2006 noted that different-sized cities often specialize – in pharmaceuticals or post-secondary education, for example – or act as a transportation hub or financial centre. ![]() In developed nations, many cities now function as economic hothouses, bringing together high concentrations of expertise, capital and entrepreneurs. But while global urbanization is often associated with vast mega-cities such as Tokyo, Cairo and São Paolo, a majority of the world’s city-dwellers actually live in compact metropolitan areas with fewer than 500,000 residents. The year 2009 marked a watershed moment: for the first time in history, half the world’s population lived in cities.
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