They built the index. But you build the ranking.
by Svetlana Tesic, CoFounder Mayors of Europe
Cities have been ranked for decades.
But rarely by the people who actually live in them.
This is not another story about an index dominated by Vienna.
Not another attempt to rank cities against a fixed set of criteria, defined somewhere far from the people who experience them every day. Not another scoreboard telling cities what they should aspire to be.
This is a story about choice.
About shifting the power to define what makes a city “good” from institutions and methodologies, back to individuals.
Because the truth is simple: what makes a city work for you may not work for someone else.
For decades, city rankings have tried to compress urban life into standardized legit metrics GDP, infrastructure, innovation scores, livability indexes. Useful, yes. But also inherently limited. They assume there is a universal formula for what matters.
But, there is not, not any more. The way we live have changed. So the way we measure the quality of our lives need to.
From static rankings to dynamic preferences
What makes this approach fundamentally different is it’s logic.
The Index provides a structured framework: growth, capability, community, creativity, viability. Familiar pillars, well grounded. But the ranking itself? That is no longer fixed.
You decide what matters more. You assign the weight. You shape the outcome.
In other words: the model stays the same, but the priorities become personal.
A founder might prioritize growth and capability.
A family might lean toward community and stability.
A creative professional might value openness, culture, and experimentation.
The result is not one “best city” but multiple truths, depending on who is asking.
Why this matters now
Cities are entering a different phase.
We are moving from planning for citizens to designing with them. From centralized decisions to distributed expectations. From static policies to adaptive systems.
And yet, many of the tools we use to evaluate cities still belong to the old model.
Static rankings assume stability. But cities today are anything but static. They are evolving ecosystems shaped by migration, technology, climate pressures, economic shifts, and increasingly, by the expectations of people who can choose where to live, work, and belong.
In that context, a single ranking is not just insufficient, but also a misleading.
A subtle but important shift in power
What this model introduces is a sense of ownership.
It acknowledges our personal value-based decisions as evaluating criteria. And claim that decision as it should not be outsourced entirely to analysts, institutions, or global benchmarks.
It should remain, at least in part, in the hands of those who experience the city daily. This is where the shift becomes interesting for cities themselves. Because when people can define what matters, cities can start to care not just where they rank, but why they matter to different groups of people. Which is a far more actionable insight than any static position on a global list.
It also reframes what competition between cities could look like. Not a race for visibility or positioning in externally defined rankings, but a more meaningful form of competition, the one grounded in how well cities align with what their citizens actually value as quality of life.
Testing it: what my ranking revealed
When I tested it myself, the values popped up immediately as I asked myself What do I care about?
When you are forced to assign weight, you cannot stay abstract. You have to make trade-offs.
Do I prioritize growth over community?
Capability over creativity?
Stability over openness?
And that’s where it becomes interesting.
Cities I would instinctively consider “strong” did not necessarily rank highest once I adjusted the weights to reflect what matters to me now: sunlight, clean air, and a sense of belonging, things no index has ever fully captured.
Others, less obvious at first glance, moved up. Not because they perform better across all metrics,
but because they align better with what I am looking for.
And that is the point. The value of this model is not in telling you where a city stands.
It is in helping you understand why it matters to you or not.
And maybe that’s the point
Cities have always been complex. Messy. Layered. Contradictory.
Trying to reduce them to a single ranking was always an oversimplification.
What this approach does is simple, but powerful: It accepts that complexity
and offer us a way to navigate it on their own terms.
They built the index.
But you build the ranking.
Behind the model: Structure without prescription
What makes this approach credible is not only its flexibility, but the rigor behind it.
The Smart and Liveable Cities Index (SLIC) is built on a structured methodology that brings together five core dimensions: growth, viability, capability, community, and creativity. Each of these is supported by measurable indicators, creating a consistent analytical foundation across cities.
What is important here is that the model itself remains stable.
The indicators, the structure, and the relationships between dimensions are carefully defined. This ensures comparability and coherence, something traditional indexes have long provided.
But SLIC makes a deliberate distinction: The model is fixed. The interpretation is yours.
Instead of prescribing a single hierarchy, the framework allows users to assign their own priorities across these dimensions, effectively generating a personalized ranking based on what matters to them.
For those interested in the full methodology, including the indicators and weighting logic, it is available here: https://slic-index-v2.vercel.app/methodology
And maybe that’s the point
Cities have always been complex. Messy. Layered. Contradictory.
Trying to reduce them to a single ranking was always an oversimplification.
What this approach does is simple, but powerful: It accepts that complexity and gives people a way to navigate it on their own terms.
They built the index.
But you build the ranking. And perhaps for the first time, that distinction actually matters.
A note on authorship
The Smart and Liveable Cities Index (SLIC) is developed by Non Arkaraprasertkul, architect, urban designer, and smart city specialist; Harvard-affiliated doctoral researcher in anthropology and cities focused on human-centered smart cities and real-world implementation and Associate Professor Poon Thiengburanathum as a public ranking model designed to explore alternative ways of understanding urban performance.
Their work sits at the intersection of urban design, data, and human behavior, bringing a distinctly people-centered perspective to how cities are measured and experienced.
