Twenty parts of city life, and how many cities can say anything about each.
Four pillars: environment, society, economy, governance. Five scales: neighbourhood, city, region, the natural region around it, and the planet. That makes twenty cells. Each cell leans toward PITO or DIDO depending on what it counts: cells that count what comes in and goes out lean PITO; cells that count what a place can sense, make and decide lean DIDO. Click a cell to see what it measures and how many of the sixty-one cities have a source for it. The one cell Paris and Hamburg were scored on is outlined.
The Index has twenty cells. Eight are tracked place by place: the four pillars at city and region scale. The bioregion and planet rows are read once for everyone, and the community row is what a node fills.
On the outlined cell. Utopies scored around 600 French urban areas on this cell in 2018 and put Paris at 37.58. Boeing scored Hamburg on it in 2024 and got 37.00. Two countries, two statistical systems, six years apart, the same number. That is not a coincidence about France or Germany. It is the ceiling for any large Western city that measures only its economy at city scale from public data, because those flows are set by global supply chains, not by anything a city decides. The other nineteen cells are where a city can actually move.
On the weights. The weights are v0 and under review; they are set out in Methodology §3. Three cells still need a better argument before they harden: economy at the natural-region scale (0.8 / 0.2), environment at neighbourhood scale (0.5 / 0.5), economy at neighbourhood scale (0.3 / 0.7).