The Bloomberg New Economy Dynamic Cities Framework, an evolution of the Cities Council, a working group created in 2021 as a response to building better cities in the wake of the pandemic, has launched a new resource that tracks the progress of thirty ‘New Economy’ cities across eighteen indicators.

The Dynamic Cities Dashboard was designed to highlight important elements of city life regardless of size with their progress measured and tracked over time to enable productive change.

“Cities are the life and blood of human prosperity and progress, where we come together as social animals and innovate. Tools like this Dashboard allow us to be absolutely clinical and objective when it comes to the importance of criteria for comparing cities,” says Norman Foster OM, Founder and Chairman of Foster + Partners and member of the Bloomberg New Economy Dynamic Cities Coalition.

Selected in consultation with coalition members including world-renowned architects Norman Foster and Bjarke Ingels, government officials including Freetown Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyer and Indonesia’s Bambang Susantono, and social entrepreneurs such as Brazil’s Edu Lyra, the New Economy cities are grouped into six archetypes to enable comparisons across different stages of growth.

The cities tracked by the Dashboard are Auckland, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Casablanca, Copenhagen, Hong Kong, Istanbul, Jakarta, Johannesburg, Lagos, London, Manila, Medellín, Mexico City, Montreal, Mumbai, Nairobi, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Riyadh, San Salvador, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, and Warsaw.

To supercharge this work, the Dynamic Cities Coalition has brought on board a new Co-Chair represented by Urban Partners, a platform of investment strategies with a visionary focus on holistic, sustainable, and inclusive urban development — the values that have formed the foundation of the coalition’s work and mission since its launch.

“I’m excited to work with the Coalition members and Bloomberg’s access to powerful technology, expertise, and data to develop this Dashboard into an informative tool for city stakeholders. Urban Partners have placed the creation of better and more sustainable cities at the very core of our business proposition, and we believe an open-sourced data-driven approach is essential to turn urban areas into global engines of growth and innovation. As cities face major challenges stemming from rapid urbanization, such as climate impact, health, and livability, capital and knowledge will be key ingredients for driving positive change,” comments Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Co-founder & Chairperson at Urban Partners.

The Dashboard builds on existing urban indices and rankings with additional considerations including:

• Shifting attention South and East in line with global shifts in the size and power of urban centres, given that 410 cities in the emerging and developing world are expected to generate almost 45 percent of global growth through 2025.
• Aiming to capture improvements and positive change with both progress and performance indicators, versus simply highlighting which cities are already furthest ahead.
• Being holistic, with six pillars representing different aspects of city success, as opposed to a single emphasis (e.g., on sustainability or entrepreneurship).
• Using city archetypes to make fair cross-regional comparisons by identifying key characteristics that different kinds of cities share in solutions and potential pathways, understanding that “one size does not fit all.”
• Linking indicators to the UN SDGs in support of a multilateral approach that optimizes interventions and ladders up to a global agenda.

Underpinned by the principles of the Bloomberg New Economy Dynamic Cities Framework (published in 2021), the cities are evaluated according to pillars that provide a foundation of stability (Fair, Sustainable, Happy) and those that are drivers of change (Innovative, Data-driven, and Responsive).

In harnessing the power of data, the Dashboard aims to promote standardized data collection at the city level, empower urbanities with information to demand more from their governments, and set the development agenda for local, as well as national, governments and decision makers.

“The Dashboard’s methodology draws on an exhaustive screening of global cities and represents the input of multiple global thinkers, researchers and data scientists, to develop a uniquely balanced and relevant scorecard for developing and developed cities to track performance and identify relevant best practices,” says Dr. Lola Woetzel, Director of McKinsey Global Institute & Co-Chair of Urban China Initiative.