Cities Data Book - Urban Indicators for Managing Cities
Full Review

Reviewed by: Trevor Kanaley, Former Director General, AusAID; Centre for Developing Cities, University of Canberra.
Review posted 17 February 2004
Review No. 10

CD-ROM Information

Content: Capacity building through development of policy-related statistical database.
Publication Date: 1 January 2001
Audience: Urban policy makers and managers, and community groups.

Size: 145 MB
Price: US$10
Manual needed: No
How to order:

Order by mail:
ADB Publications Unit
P.O. Box 789
0980 Manila
Philippines

E-mail: adbpub@adb.org
Tel: +632 636 2648
Fax: +632 636 2648

CD-ROM content online.*

*This link takes you outside the ADBI website. Please use the back button to return to ADBI.org.

Full Review

The CD-ROM's aim is to improve urban management by strengthening policy development and implementation through the use of comparative urban indicators and benchmarking. It contains a discussion of the issues surrounding policy-based urban indicator systems, an implementation of a pilot system in 18 cities in the Asia and Pacific region, and a toolkit for replicating this approach in other cities.

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User

The CD-ROM is a publication of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). Its main users are expected to be policy makers and urban managers of cities in the Asia and Pacific region. It should also be valuable to the work of community-based organizations, NGOs, businesses, as well as ADB staff, consultants, and other professionals involved in using urban indicators and performance benchmarking.

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Content

The cities in the pilot system are:

ADB approved the project to prepare the Cities Data Book and this associated CD-ROM in June 1999, and consultancy services were provided from August 1999 to February 2001. The statistical information is impressive in its scope and coverage but is mainly mid to late 1990’s and is already becoming dated.

For each city, the information covers these 13 indicators:

• Population, Urbanization and Migration
• Equity
• Health and Education
• Urban Productivity
• New technology
• Urban Land
• Housing
• Municipal Services
• Urban Environment
• Urban Transport
• Culture
• Urban Government Finance
• Urban Governance

The CD-ROM is successful in collecting, presenting, and comparing a broad range of information on the selected cities. This is a considerable achievement. As the CD-ROM notes, there is an "endemic data shortfall" on cities and comparable data is even more difficult to obtain. The Toolkit on the CD-ROM should be particularly useful for other cities if they decide to develop an urban indicators database for their own purposes.

The CD-ROM is less successful as a guide to the application of this information to the work of urban policy formulation and implementation. This will significantly reduce its usefulness to its intended audience. In this regard, a recommendation by participants in the final workshop on preparing the Cities Data Book was that further work on the application of indicators in city management be pursued and discussed with the stakeholders. The CD-ROM makes reference to on-going networking, the establishment of a cadre of city-level information resource persons, a network of city managers, and of a website to take this work forward but it is unclear if this is occurring. A quick search failed to reveal any reference to further work on either ADB's or the Cities Data Book websites.

The CD-ROM contains a number of papers prepared by senior resource persons:

• "Urban Indicators for Asia's Cities: From Theory To Practice", (Peter Hall, Professor of Planning, Bartlett School of Architecture and Planning, University College London)
• "Urban Indicators for Managing Cities", (Peter Newton, Chief Research Scientist, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia)
• "The Cities Data Book Process: Developing And Applying Urban Indicators", (Mathew Westfall, Senior Urban Development Specialist, ADB and Giles Clarke, Urban Development Consultant)
• "Comparing the Cities Database", (Terry McGee, Professor of Institute of Asian Research, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)

There is also a copy of ADB's "Urban Sector Strategy".

Each of these papers is interesting and informative in its own right and collectively they canvass the major issues in developing and using urban indicators. However the CD-ROM suffers from this form of presentation. It is too wordy and repetitious: the usual problem of using a number of different authors without a ruthless editor. This would not be a weakness for a collection of essays but it limits this CD-ROM’s use as a practical guide to action by city managers in developing countries. The CD-ROM would have been strengthened if these papers had been used as resource documents and someone had been charged with writing a stand alone, more integrated, and internally consistent document.

One subject that could have been accorded more critical and focused attention is the definition of geographic boundaries for data collection and analysis. The database uses a local government area definition when, as the discussion on the CD-ROM recognizes, local government areas often have widely different functions and finances both within and between countries. Also local government areas frequently bear no relationship to a city's boundaries and some critical urban services, such as water supply, electricity, sewerage, and drainage, are often provided outside the local government structure by authorities that more closely match a city’s boundaries. Boundaries for data collection for cities is a difficult issue to resolve and perhaps the solution on the CD-ROM of using local government boundaries is the most practical solution for a generalized database. Nevertheless, the definition of boundaries for urban indicators and performance benchmarking may well require a more flexible case-by-case approach in practice to bring benefits for policy development and implementation.

User Friendliness and Interactivity

The CD-ROM’s user interface is generally clear and functional. The CD-ROM loaded smoothly on two different computer systems – one a high end Pentium IV desktop and the other a Celeron Notebook – and in both cases the setup routine worked effectively. The minimum system requirements are modest and are noted on the CD-ROM sleeve. In operation the CD-ROM opens to a home page with a series of menus and an interactive map that allows the user to quickly explore any particular city of interest. Importantly, the interface encourages the user to click and explore the CD-ROM and there is no need for a separate user guide. A particularly useful feature is the Dynamic City Comparison Section. This is a search engine that allows data comparisons specified by the user. This is one of the main benefits of having the Cities Data Book on CD-ROM rather than as a paper publication.

Some aspects of the interface, however, are annoyingly inefficient. In particular once the user has entered a section the only way out is to return to the home page. This inhibits quick movement around the CD-ROM. There is no cross-linking from menus which makes moving through the CD-ROM unnecessarily time consuming. An analogy would be a reference book where the reader always had to go to the main contents page rather than simply turning directly to the page desired.

Mostly the CD-ROM worked well but it would have benefited from some closer attention to detail prior to publication. From the Resources menu the References sub-section would not open. Another problem with the Resources section was with the Internet Links sub-section. Internet Links is a very useful resource but a significant number of links would not open. This problem is, to some extent, unavoidable. As sites close or change their internet addresses over time it is not possible to keep such lists up to date once a CD-ROM is released and distributed.

There are also some other problems of attention to detail on the CD-ROM such as in errors in links in the Charts and Tables sub-section. A click on the link for the Tourism and Corporate Headquarters table, for example, opens a table on Urban Productivity. Another example; opening the link for the Commercial Flights table opens a table on Travel to Work.

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Distribution

The CD-ROM allows for easily contacting ADB. The Contact ADB option opens the users e-mail program at the address info@adb.org. However throughout the CD-ROM there are no links to ADB’s website (even in the Internet Links area) except neatly hidden as a vertical strip on an already fairly full opening screen. Given the likely readership it would seem desirable to have had some direct links to Urban Affairs Issues on ADB's website.

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Sustainability

In conclusion, ADB is to be congratulated for undertaking this important and difficult exercise. Despite some weaknesses, the CD-ROM is a considerable step towards strengthening the use of urban indicators by cities in the Asia and Pacific region. However, as is recognized on the CD-ROM, while the publication (and the associated process to develop the publication) is important, it is only an initial step. A weakness of the CD-ROM (and this is not rectified by information on ADB’s or the Cities Data Book websites) is that there is no clear indication of how this work will be taken forward so that it will yield practical improvements in urban policy.

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