Methodology
How Global City Intelligence scores affordability, air quality, energy readiness, and resilience with transparent source-backed logic.
Scores are intentionally practical: a city is healthier to live in when access, exposure, affordability, and resilience work together.
| Metric | Value | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Affordability | 25% | Housing pressure, daily essentials, transport dependency, and service access. |
| Air quality | 25% | Health-oriented interpretation of PM2.5, PM10, nitrogen dioxide, ozone, and monitoring confidence. |
| Energy readiness | 25% | Clean-energy transition capacity, grid resilience, climate stress, and renewable-resource context. |
| Urban resilience | 25% | Climate adaptation, institutional capacity, infrastructure reliability, and daily-life continuity. |
How the country directory is ordered, and what that order does and does not claim.
The country directory opens in order of economic size: nominal GDP in current US dollars, largest first. The values are World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator NY.GDP.MKTP.CD. The optional second sort uses GDP per capita in current US dollars, indicator NY.GDP.PCAP.CD. Alphabetical order remains available as a utility sort.
One reference year. Every value in the snapshot belongs to 2024, the most recent year for which both indicators are published for every supported country the World Bank reports. Nothing is compared across vintages, and no value is presented as if it were current-year data.
Missing values. A country the World Bank does not report carries no value. It is never treated as zero — zero would sort it as the smallest economy in the world — and it is never dropped from the directory. It appears after every country with a comparable figure, and the interface says the value is not reported.
This is an ordering, not a ranking. Nothing here is a Global City Intelligence score, a composite, or a weighting of several statistics. Two published World Bank indicators are stored as they are issued and sorted numerically. GDP is not a measure of wealth as households experience it, and GDP per capita is not a measure of quality of life; neither is described as such anywhere in the product.
The snapshot is committed and rebuilt deliberately by scripts/build-country-economics.mjs. Nothing is fetched at request time.
The platform avoids thin generated pages by pairing each score with visible context, tables, source blocks, and internal links. Scores are useful only when users can understand what is being rewarded, what is being penalized, and which data category drives the interpretation.
The data layer is production-shaped. Each city, module, ranking, and source is typed so verified datasets can be integrated continuously without changing crawlable routes, metadata, or structured data.
4 institutional references inform this view, listed below with reliability notes. Structured indicators on this page are directional and intended for orientation; verified datasets are being integrated and official sources should be used for critical decisions.
Used as a policy and methodology reference for urban exposure and resilience signals.
Used to normalize air-quality indicators toward health-protective benchmarks.
Used as an energy-resource and weather-normalization reference.
Used to explain urban climate vulnerability and adaptation scoring logic.