Quality of Life and City Competitiveness

Abstract

People love lists, especially lists which position one place, one person, one above another. In this paper, we explore initially public and other interest in one type of list the rating of cities and locations in terms of the quality of life they offer. In particular, the paper focuses on how quality of life has been viewed as part of the profile of acompetitive city'; one that is successful in attracting the attention of capital, and the ways in which quality of life factors have been identified as influential in patterns of urban growth and development. In the second part of the paper, we discuss the way that this use of quality of life as part of place promotion and city marketing has placed most emphasis on a rather narrow conception of quality of lift:, one that is place-based rather than people-based. Arising from the privileging capital's view of quality of life, we open up the discussion to alternative ways of conceiving of quality of life and consider if there are alternative visions of competitive cities which could arise from such conceptualisations. 2. City Ratings The calculation of comparison and ratings, increasingly expressed in the form of league tables, is far from new. But, since the 1980s, the rating of cities has reached new heights, with even the UK government presenting sets of official statistics in the form of league tables and comparative rankings-such as for education and health performance-and employing these ratings in the publicity associated with official statistics, such as recent Regional Trends. The present spate of interest in place ratings can probably be traced to the publication in the US of the Places Rated Almanac (Boyer and Savageau, 1981). This best-selling publication has been updated several times and reprinted many times, attracting a readership amongst the public as well as professionals concerned with the promotion of cities, with the selling or property in these cities, and with the construction of the city environments which are being assessed. However, the book also appealed to the general public and to companies and organisations who were interested in contemplating business or family moves. The conclusion that Pittsburgh-once seen as the city epitomising the legacy of declining manufacturing industries was the best place to live unsurprisingly challenged public perceptions of the cities of North America and generated considerable and at times legal debates about the merits of the study and the validity of the results and their applications in city promotion. What marks out the Places Rated Almanac however, is not the actual results, but the fact that it represents the first serious attempt to popularise a statistical ranking of metropolitan areas and to do so on the basis of what has been termedquality of life' factors - those elements which define the livability of a place. Earlier research which had also attempted to construct ranks of places in terms of quality of life had been less successful in achieving public acclaim (or notoriety). Smith's (1973) and Liu's (1976) studies, for example, of the US SMSAs had much greater statistical rigour than the Boyer and Savageau study, but achieved less public impact. Elsewhere, there has also been a growth in the quality of life indices at a variety of geographical scales which have been generated and have attracted media and public attention. International comparisons have formed the basis of Fortune Magazine's ranking of the world's best cities, whilst a similar title has been applied to Montreal, Seattle and Melbourne from the assessment of livability by the Population Crisis Committee (1990). Indeed, in many of the developed nations, league tables of urban areas have become common. In Britain, not all the studies have focused exclusively on quality of life issues. Some employ more