Making urban progress legible : the role of territorial social indicators in the new economy

Abstract

In the 1960s, a social indicator movement flourished in the United States: agencies ranging from the USDA to NASA advocated for a national social accounting body, cities regularly published data-driven reports on urban wellbeing, and academics assembled comprehensive social progress indices for cities, counties, and states. Unfortunately, the social indicator movement stalled amidst the economic turbulence of the 1970s, and has never regained its strength. This thesis argues that there is an urgent need for the resurrection of the urban social indicator movement, particularly as technological and macroeconomic changes have driven a wedge between economic development and human wellbeing, with the gains generated by economic growth increasingly accruing to capital rather than labor. If gross product is a misleading and incomplete proxy for urban progress, other measures are needed to make urban progress legible. To demonstrate the utility of such a measure, I present an Urban Progress Index of 486 urbanized areas in the United States for 2012 and 2016, consolidating indicators of health, education, prosperity, income equality, gender equality, racial equality, and safety. I evaluate the index rankings with respect to population size, mean income, and change over time, and compare two cluster analyses of cities based on their social indicator scores and their industrial compositions, revealing how patterns of wellbeing correlate with the presence of particular industries.