How each pillar's neighbourhood readings add up into a city score, and city into region. Pillar by pillar, step by step, with the method named.
This page is the rulebook for how the scores add up, and where the methods review starts. There are eight steps: four pillars (Environmental, Social, Economic, Governance) times two jumps in level (Community → City, City → Region). Each one names the method it uses (weighted mean, prefix-projection, conditional aggregation, pass-through), how settled that method is, and an honest read on how far to trust it. Version 0 has not pinned down all eight steps equally. The gaps are flagged.
How the scores step up — Community → City → Region
There are two jumps inside the nested Community → City → Region structure.Beyond the region the table ends, because the nesting ends: the bioregion and the planet are not steps that add up, and they are covered in Boundary Context.
| Pillar | Community → City | City → Region |
|---|
The bioregion and the planet are not steps that add up.
The Vivanco framework is explicit about the roles: the neighbourhood is operational, the city and region are governance, the bioregion and the planet are limits. There is no rule for adding a region up into its bioregion, because no government sits at the bioregion to take that score and act on it. The bioregion's carrying capacity and the planet's limits are read: they set the bar for whether a region's score can be called a success. See the Boundary Context page for the full reference dashboard.
Governance × (City → Region) is the thinnest step in this version. When only 3 of N municipalities publish open data on a comparable schedule, the region's open-data score should not be a plain weighted mean over all N. Version 0 does not yet say whether thin-coverage cells use (a) a confidence-weighted mean with an explicit confidence pill, (b) a hard coverage threshold below which the cell reads structural placeholder, or (c) a Bayesian update over prior publication. Until that rule is set, the dashboard cannot show the Governance × Region score honestly. This is an open question in this version, under review toward v1.
Three other steps are under-specified in the same way, less sharply: Economic × (Community → City) on the MRL projection function; Environmental × (City → Region) on EUROSTAT MFA (material-flow accounting) lag handling; Social × (City → Region) on the MSA (metropolitan statistical area) threshold.
The score each level works out
At each level the score is the FCI formula worked out over the parts that belong to that level. That level's score is then carried up by the method named in the table above. The formula is the same at every ring:
Here DIDO (data in, data out — what a place can make and share) is the weighted mean of the parts' DIDO, PITO (products in, trash out — what it still imports and wastes) is the matching sum, and ρ (how fast a place turns what it learns into action) is measured at the level the reading lives in, and only where there is an agreed way to measure it. Region-level ρ is mock, ρ protocol pending: no partner runs a regional policy-adoption tracker, so it carries the mock label until one is agreed. ρ is never quietly set to 1.
Confidence is the team's read on whether a shown score would hold up under review. Very low confidence means the score should carry the structural-placeholder hatch in the matrix view.
↪ Next: see the prefix relationship drawn out in the drilldown · or return to the aggregation atlas.