April 25th 2024 – Today, the Bloomberg New Economy Cities Coalition (“the Coalition”) launched a new resource tracking the progress of 30 ‘New Economy’ cities across 18 indicators. The Dynamic Cities Dashboard (“the 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. 

Norman Foster OM, Founder and Chairman of Foster + Partners and member of the Bloomberg New Economy Cities Coalition said: “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.”

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 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. 

Mikkel Bülow-Lehnsby, Co-founder & Chairperson at Urban Partners, said: “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.” 

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. 

Dr. Lola Woetzel, Director of McKinsey Global Institute & Co-Chair of Urban China Initiative said: “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.” 

You can find more information about the methodology behind the Dynamic Cities Dashboard in the following factsheet.

For further details, contact:

Anna Hillinge, Head of Communications, Urban Partners:

+4521136243 / anhi@urban.partners