The new city prosperity index will attempt to track progress across five key issues: productivity, infrastructure, quality of life, equity, and environmental sustainability.
For cities like Barcelona and Tel Aviv, city governments designed strategic approaches to infrastructure, quality of life, and architecture in order to build a profile that would attract global talent.
The adoption of a more progressive and balanced agenda of 'people-centred' urban prosperity in the UN-Habitat's newly developed CPI has already led to a more holistic approach to integrating productivity, infrastructure, quality of life, equity and social inclusion, and environmental sustainability into a coherent framework.
Many of them are higher-income cities within their respective regions and seek to leverage their efficient infrastructure, improved quality of life, and better security and environmental performance compared to the larger megacities.
These industries thrive on the kinds of major investments in infrastructure and quality of life that only government can make, in schools and transportation and fiber optics and parkland.
One of Summersgill's concerns was that those European cities that were most often cited as boasting the best social infrastructure and quality of life were much smaller than London – cities such as Copenhagen and Malmo, for example, have about 2 or 3 million people, compared with the 8 million (and growing) population of London.
Prior to fieldwork, the impacts of transportation infrastructure on quality of life (i.e. health, safety and security issues, green spaces), were hypothesized to be a key issue, especially regarding social equity.
Migration Watch, a think tank which campaigns for tighter immigration controls, is concerned at the effect the UK's rising population would have on the country's infrastructure and quality of life, and so organised the petition.
He does not enroll in the Fair Trade system and prefers instead to give "the ten cents per pound that Intelligentsia previously paid TransFair USA directly to the farmers to improve infrastructure and quality of life," writes Michaele Weissman in the book, God in a Cup: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Coffee.
Whatever else you might think about immigration, or about the importance of spending money on quality-of-life infrastructure and services, they are ultimately the key to our economic health.
Like me, are you really getting a sense, really feeling how much the small changes in overall infrastructure can improve the totality of the quality-of-life for New Yorkers?
