You would expect a mega corporation with the name of Citi to be interested in how cities function – and it appears they are. The banking giant has an initiative called Citi for Cities which while obviously channel for their business, also provides some interesting information on cities. They describe it as.
Cities generate prosperity and advance society. They are where citizens strive, where businesses drive growth, and where governments create the conditions for success. As over 100 million people move to urban areas each year, our cities are in the midst of an unprecedented transformation. Citi for Cities applies the full capabilities and global expertise of Citi to meet urban challenges in more than 1,000 cities across the globe, every day.
One thing they have done as part of this initiative is to commission The Economist’s Intelligence Unit (EIU) to produce a benchmarking study looking at the future competitiveness of cities. They have then compared the results for 2025 to see how they are expected to change from 2012. All up they compared 120 different cities across the world. Here is the list of cities they assessed
Competitiveness is obviously quite a complex measure so this is the methodology they used.
Competitiveness is a holistic concept. While economic size and growth matter, several other factors determine a city’s competitiveness, including its business and regulatory environment, its institutions, the quality of human capital, cultural aspects and the quality of environmental governance. These factors not only help a city to sustain high economic growth, but also secure its future competitiveness.
Against this backdrop, the Economist Intelligence Unit defines a city’s competitiveness as its ability to attract capital, businesses, talent and visitors. The 2025 City Competitiveness Index benchmarks the competitiveness of 120 cities across the world at two distinct points in time: today and in 2025. We do so by examining 32 indicators for each city. Indicators are grouped into eight distinct, thematic categories and assigned weights: economic strength 30%, physical capital and financial maturity 10% each, institutional character and human capital 15% each, global appeal 10%, social and cultural character 5%, and environment and natural hazards 5%.
The Index includes a total of 27 qualitative and five quantitative indicators.
A city’s overall ranking in the benchmark Index is a weighted score of the individual categories. For a full breakdown of the categories, individual indicators and sub-indicators, weightings and data sources, see the Appendix.
While the report doesn’t give detailed breakdowns of how cities perform in each of the categories, it does say that Auckland is in the top 20 for Institutional Character which looks at Electoral process and pluralism, Local government fiscal autonomy, Taxation, Rule of law and Government effectiveness.
The report also noted that there was no major correlation between the size or density of a city to its competitiveness rating however they did find a strong correlation to the quality of the cities physical capital.
The quality of a city’s physical capital is highly correlated with its overall competitiveness. Statistically, the correlation between a city’s competitiveness and the quality of its physical capital—defined in the Index as the quality of physical infrastructure, public transport and telecommunications infrastructure—is the strongest among the eight sub-categories that make up the Index. Two Chinese cities, Shanghai and Beijing, ascend to the top 20 in terms of their physical capital in 2025 and are among a group that is otherwise dominated by a mix of rich, well established global cities. Eleven of them are also among the 20 most competitive overall.
What’s interesting is how strong the mention of public transport is, the quality of the road network is one of the sub categories within the physical infrastructure group. The rankings come from the EIUs Global Liveability Index and we know from that the one thing that really lets us down is our PT infrastructure. Anyway enough about the methodology, on to the rankings – here are the top 10
While Auckland is a bit further down the list ranking 42nd overall. While our score does improve slightly, it isn’t enough and sees us slip 11 places from 2012.
As mentioned earlier, there is a strong correlation between the quality of physical infrastructure and competitiveness. We also know that one of the biggest areas that lets us down is the quality of our PT yet despite that, current plans still see 60-70% of all new funding going towards more roads. Perhaps it’s time to flip that funding around and focus on fixing one of the key areas that is letting us down.
While also looking around the Citi for Cities website, I came across this section which looked at different parts of the urban ecosystem and naturally I went to look at the transport section which contains:
To be prosperous, sustainable, and globally competitive, cities must increase their transport capacity, upgrade their transport technology, and make critical infrastructure investments.
The reason I found this interesting is that the focus is not on improving the speed of a single occupant vehicle but on improving transport capacity. I suspect that if we were to assess the various proposed transport project based on how much capacity they add to the overall transport system we might get some very different results in terms of project priorities.
Lastly a little something on one of the costs of parking that doesn’t often get thought about.
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I notw that Vancouver drops 5 over the same time frame, and Atlanta – one of the ost car dependant places in the US basically swaps places with Auckland (they go up 9 from 42nd place while we drop 11 to 42). Evan crappy old Houston, mamages +2.
Hmm, maybe all those “Lexus lanes” really do something positive to a city?
Unless Houston is due to the massive investments in wind and solar?
How do we compare to the two cities (ignoring Lagos) discussed in the previous post? Los Angeles is 17. Houston is 27.
We need to do whatever Los Angeles and Houston are doing!
Or perhaps we aim to emulate those in the top 10
It’s a measure of competitiveness and most of the top ten are world alpha cities or close to it. The only one that isn’t is Stockholm. We’re never going to be competitive when compared to Hong Kong or London. They each provide financial services to a billion people, while we have ASB and Kiwibank.
The alarming thing is that we’re falling down the rankings. Brown promised to make Auckland the world’s most livable city rather than it’s most competitive, but the two things are linked to the extent that competitiveness helps grow the economy, employment, and salaries. We’re going down the rankings while cities like Kuala Lumpur, Atlanta, and Miami are improving their rankings to overtake us. Or just improving their rankings full stop, like Houston and Los Angeles. A few rail projects aren’t going to turn this around.
Len Brown’s had what, 3 years? You’re expecting a lot in a short time.
Well actually Auckland could fly up these rankings with ‘a few rail projects’ but of course only on top of the other projects that are already underway; integrated fares, the New Bus Network, and the new trains. The ‘few rail projects’ especially the CRL and the Mangere/Airport Line are the next step to really put a solid core under these changes. You are too harsh on Len’s policies: 1. they take multiple years to bear fruit [too soon to judge], and 2. they are facing deliberate political opposition from powerful enemies.
The really good news is that once this opposition is overcome, and as the current changes start to take effect Auckland is in a great position to quite quickly improve the state of its weakest measure; Transit capacity, effectiveness, user appeal, and efficiency. And therefore also the effectiveness and resilience of its only full current network; the private car system.
I would expect the RPTP, pedestrianizing Queen St and a airport rail line would have some impact on how Auckland is viewed from the outside.
Completely agree Bryce. It isn’t really acceptable that any international guest faces either a $60 cab ride or an incredibly confusing hour plus bus ride to get to town. That is the kind of thing that makes us apear far less competitive. Railto the Airport and the CRL as well as AMETI and finishing the Northern Busway would probably nearly double our transport capacities which will obviously help.
A lot of the support functions for the financial services industry are footloose now, witness large scale relocations to Asia and to centres such as Glasgow and Belfast for operations, finance, HR and IT from London. Guess the plans our leader had for a funds management hub in New Zealand have gone silent because of our lack of investment in the right infrastructure creating competitiveness issues? Also notice how Birmingham seems to be slowly creeping up the rankings. Assume this is a result of the Big City Plan there and investment in transport. Imagine it could overtake Auckland in a year or two and shows how cities can transform quite quickly with good implementation.
Both of them, but particularly, LA, are investing in improving public transport. Houston is also revising archaic planning rules to allow increased property densities after recognising that unconstrained sprawl is killing the city’s liveability.
And Houston is building light rail.
Lets do what LA and Houston are doing?
Maybe, lets do it smarter though.
Under Power and utilities Citi says:
“Energy and utilities are essential to city life. Reliable energy, access to clean water, and effective waste management are central for citizens’ wellbeing and businesses’ ability to grow.”
Yet, none of the cited US examples (Houston, Phoenix, LA) – basically all US cities in the southern parts of the US are using water sustainably.
[Building houses with lots of swimming pools in the middle of a desert is not sustainable].
Seems to me that having the most fantastic city in the world is meaningless if it runs out of clean water.
Something which Citi seem to overlook as basically job #1 of any city despite their rhetoric about it being important they seem to give no marks for having such an approach.
Not that NZ is doing particularly well in that regard of preserving our water supplies and keeping them clean, but we do have a lot of rainfall to help give us a natural advantage over those desert states of the US who have to import their water from halfway across the US via huge canal projects.
LA was basically a desert until the arrival of the water from out of state.
“Lets do what LA and Houston are doing?”
Sure; let’s become the global HQs for the trillion dollar entertainment and energy businesses. Sure no problem. Let’s do that, who should we call?.
WE are currently the global centre for dairy trade aren’t we? That is hardly a small industry.
Is the Nestlé head office in Auckland…?
“In 2010, the largest producer of milk and milk products was India followed by the United States, China, Germany, Brazil, and Russia.[3][44] The 27 countries of the European Union together produced about 138 million tonnes of milk in 2011.[45]”
Shhhhhh don’t say that! We are the best farmers country, most of the people lives in the countryside and we love our cars
We are the largest *exporter* of milk products however, India produces entirely for it own demand, and while we produce about the same as Germany and the USA but obviously have a tiny domestic market and almost all is exported.
I was referring to export quantities as that is generally what actually matters. Also, of all of those countries listed we are the only one to make dairy products whithout subsidies. We are a small city we get to be a big player in small industries, and with 1/3 of all intl. dairy trade coming from NZ I would say that we are the global industry leader, even if we aren’t the biggest producer.
Fonterra is a global player, and very important to NZ, but that still does not make Auckland comparable to LA’s position in the global entertainment industry nor Houston’s position as the HQ of the western world’s energy industry. These are just much much bigger plays.
I thought that Mumbai passed LA in gross entertainment earnings? Maybe I was wrong.
Agree that our position isn’t really comparable but the cities who tend to be massively larger tend to again be alpha cities. We have most aspects of competitiveness sorted, we need to fix our urban form and exploit our strengths bette.
How the hell does Sydney rank higher than Paris in infrastructure?! These rankings are a bit iffy
Possibly due to the really old infrastructure in Paris vs Sydney?
Zoom into Remuera railway station on Google maps. Auckland Airport City tunnel link (planned) ?
Huh? Don’t see it, and why not just use the Onehunga line?
This is strange I can see it on Google maps app on the iPad but not on google maps on a computer.
It obviously is a mistake but it clearly states It is a planned tunnel. It starts by Remuera railway station on the motorway and ends on the southwestern motorway just south of Queenstown Rd.
I had noticed that someone put that in as a change a while ago and it was then removed. Perhaps the database that the ipad app was looking at was an old one.
This ranking sounds more like reallity! The powers that be are forever finding surveys that show Auckland in the top ten world cities for this and that. From my travels I have always found these unbelievable
Competitive cities will attract people and businesses. And in the long run, cities that have diverse economies tend to do better than those that “over invest” in one type of business/household.
Now, thinking about Auckland – the city already seems to offer quite expansive low density suburban environments. Sure, we could open up the rural hinterland to more development and in the process shave a few % off the cost of a section on the periphery, but I can’t see how this would improve the city’s underlying competitiveness much – Auckland would become bigger but not necessarily better. So while opening up to more “Houston” style sprawl may temporarily lower the cost of living, I can’t see how it will improve our competitiveness to any large degree – because Auckland already more or less seems to cater for this market of people.
Which leads me on to what I think the main thing holding Auckland back: The lack of dense, diverse, livable inner-city communities.
This hampers the city’s ability to 1) retain young NZers who covet the urban lifestyles available in places such as Stockholm, Vancouver, and Amsterdam and 2) attract migrants who are not interested in suburban sand castles, but instead in the cut and thrust of living and working in vibrant and dynamic urban environments. By not supporting denser urban communities Auckland is, I think, missing out on attracting a different type of resident from what we have now.
It is the absence of these types of people, and the businesses that they support, which more than anything seems to be holding Auckland back.
P.s. But I am definitely influenced by my own personal preferences on this issue. I do note, however, that the majority of my NZ friends are not living here – and they are the sorts of people Auckland needs. Young, well-educated, risk-takers who are prepared to have a go with a business and lose it all, because they did not have much to start with!