Defining the Super City

What if the definition of a super city was not based on size but on quality? If what we looked at was culture and crime rates, equality of opportunity and sustainability?

These are ideas I explore in a new short paper for the fast-growing telecommunications company, ITS as part of its activities around the huge UKREiiF gathering in Leeds . You can download the full paper here.

A lot of my work over the last decade has been on cities, whether that's looking at housing, energy, transport, connectivity or governance. I've worked with local authorities, transport providers, vehicle makers, telecoms networks, housing associations and health authorities. All with different perspectives but often with shared goals. And while economic growth is often a requirement for meeting those goals, it was great to look explicitly beyond scale as a metric.

In many ways it feels as if the job of the next few decades is to backfill quality into cities that have expanded rapidly, often without the investment in infrastructure, support, policing, culture, facilities, and governance that growth requires to be sustainable. Manchester, for example, has grown from 422,000 residents to over 600,000 in 25 years, during a period of constrained public spending. It is expected to grow further in the years ahead. How can we ensure that growth is sustainable, and that everyone in the city gets a good quality of life?

This is a question of policy and public spending. But it is also question about corporate culture, participation, and values. Who do we want to be, both as individuals and as organisations?

We point to some of the answers in this paper, but it is a colossal task. And those outside cities are facing equally great challenges - something I’d like to address in future projects.