A Note from TNC: Very thought provoking and relevant to modern urban thought. A should read if not a must-read. Urban leaders seeking success in.... A Note from TNC: Very thought provoking and relevant to modern urban thought. A should read if not a must-read.

Urban leaders seeking success in the new economy should stop paying attention to ubiquitous city rankings and start focusing their attentions on four dimensions of success: talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness, according to a new report released recently.

CityVitals, developed by Portland-based economist Joseph Cortright in partnership with CEOs
for Cities, lays out the rationale for the things cities must be really good at doing today and a
new set of metrics – 20 in all – to measure their progress.

“Every week it seems a new ranking of cities makes the headlines,” said Carol Coletta,
president and CEO of CEOs for Cities. “Unfortunately, few of those rankings are relevant to what
makes cities successful today. CityVitals gives urban leaders a much richer picture of what’s
going right and what’s going wrong in their cities and uncover their best opportunities to
improve.”

The 64-page booklet includes data on the top 50 metro areas in the U.S. for each of the 20
measures. It also looks at each city’s Metro Performance (economic indicators) and its Core
Vitality (the strength of the city’s urban core).

“To be successful today, cities have to develop their own unique formula that addresses the four
dimensions of urban success: talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness,” said Cortright.
“No single city performs best on all these metrics. And these metrics are very different than the
traditional recipes of cutting taxes and building convention centers or arenas.”

CityVitals enables urban leaders to assess their city’s performance on each of these four
dimensions, to plot strategies to build on strengths and offset weaknesses, and establish a
distinctive, winning and competitive strategy, he said.

“For too long, urban decision makers have invested in magic bullet solutions that they hope will
spur their city to become the next big thing,” Cortright said. “As a result we’ve seen a number
of failed copycat economic development strategies over the last decade. CityVitals works
because it recognizes that there is no one formula for greatness. But there are key ingredients
to success – the mixtures just tend to vary.”

An Explanat ion of the Four Dimensions, Me t ro Pe rformance and Core Vitality:

The Talented City: The indispensable asset in a knowledge economy is smart people. Cities are places where people build knowledge through education and experience. Cities attract smart people and create opportunities for them to develop and apply what they know. Talent, which we measure by educational attainment, the number of creative professionals, the migration of well-educated
young adults and the number of foreign born college graduates, reveals the underlying intellectual capital a region can draw on to build its economy and to weather the inevitable shocks of competition and change.

The Innovative City: The ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into reality is a critical source of competitive advantage not just for businesses but for regions, as well. Economies and regions advance by a process of trial and error. Those places that generate many trials of novel products and services are most likely to move ahead. Invisible and weightless, ideas can’t be measured directly, but the footprints they leave in the economic landscape can be traced by counting numbers of patents, the dollar value of venture capital investments, the extent of personal entrepreneurship and the number of small businesses.

The Connected City: Cities thrive as places where people can easily interact and connect. These connections are of two sorts: the easy interaction of local residents and easy connections to the rest of the world. Both internal and external connections are important. Internal connections help promote the creation of new ideas and make cities work better for their residents.

External connections enable people and businesses to tap into the global economy. We measure the local connectedness of cities by looking at a diverse array of factors including voting, community involvement, economic integration and transit use. Our measures of external connections include foreign travel, the presence of foreign students and broadband Internet use.

The Distinctive City: The unique characteristics of place may be the only truly defensible source of competitive advantage for regions. In a world of global competition, a strategy of “pretty much the same, maybe cheaper” is a recipe for mediocrity and economic stagnation. Our measures of distinctiveness are inherently incomplete. Every city has its own unique characteristics for
which there are few, if any, statistics. We offer some initial measures of distinctiveness drawn from market data about consumer behavior and its variance across U.S. metropolitan areas.
Metro Performance: The four dimensions of City Vitals — talent, innovation, connections, and distinctiveness—are important because they underpin urban prosperity. For each metropolitan area, we examined key indicators of economic wellbeing: per capita income and the rate of poverty. Per capita income provides a broad measure of overall living standards, while the poverty rate captures the extend of economic distress. Urban areas that do well in generating and attracting talent, encouraging
innovation, building connections and capitalizing on distinctiveness are the best positioned to improve the income of their residents and to reduce poverty, especially in the long run.

Core Vitality: A strong urban core also plays a critical economic role. The urban center of metropolitan areas is the focus of cultural activities, civic identity, governmental institutions and usually has the densest employment, particularly in financial, professional and creative services. Urban cores are also the iconic centers of cities, where interaction and connections are strongest. To measure the vibrancy of urban centers, we computed the income, educational attainment and poverty levels of the
urban neighborhoods within 5 miles of the center of each region’s central business district. (We use this common yardstick to overcome the problem that arises from using widely varying city boundaries to make inter-metropolitan comparisons.)

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