Data mine(field)

For Pakistan’s cities, checklists might help government more than complex math.

One of the reasons Karachi and indeed Pakistan’s other cities don’t figure prominently on metric-heavy global rankings or indices is that they have yet to become consistently ‘measurable’. Their data is not easily available, computerised and online. Take one small example: No one in Pakistan can actually tell you how many people live in Karachi because we have not had a census since 1998.

Before Pakistan’s city governments start measuring civic performance it would be worth examining the experiences of others. Take the advice of Prof. Eugenie Birch of the University of Pennsylvania who has been working with a team to create measurements for the US departments of housing, environment and transport. She discussed the challenges of achieving this with a group of 23 urbanists brought together by the Municipal Arts Society of New York and Ford and Rockefeller foundations this November. “[The teams] found that indicators have to be specific, very clear and simple, they have to be verifiable, sound, you have to be able to do them, there has to be the data,” she said. “They need to meet the goals of what you’re trying to do. They have to be replicable. Many of them use one-time indicators and cannot be reproduced. And they’ve got to be timely.”



There are thousands of indices but most of them focus on cities and not regions. There are lots for the economy, not that many for social variables. The teams Prof. Birch is involved with are now considering something as simple as a checklist.

This might be a better solution for cities in Pakistan given that it is also hard to use mathematical averages for such a highly stratified society. A checklist of basic items could also work well across indigenous languages and would do away with the complete lack of reliable and replicable data. This option might also be easier to implement during troubled political times.

Former Karachi mayor Mustafa Kamal told The Express Tribune that he’s sceptical of evaluating civic work in the absence of elected local government representatives. Karachi has not had an election since the system expired in 2009.

“Right now, the parliamentarians - the MNAs, MPAs - are carrying out civic work in their constituencies,” he said. “Amid such confusion, even if you carry out an evaluation, the basis would be wrong.”

Even if a city’s data is available there are still many points to keep in mind while preparing an index. Pablo Vaggione served as an adviser to the Green City Index (Latin America and Asia) that was prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit in 2009-2010 for Siemens. He shared over email a few pieces of advice on putting something like this together.

“[Preparing an index] is a very intensive labour and it requires commitment from the source to de-politise data,” he said, adding that one must be careful to compare apples with apples. “Data that is overly optimistic may be attractive for political reasons in the short term but it will certainly hamper the opportunities of a city knowing where it really stands, and if policies are helping it progress.” In Karachi, for example, this would be a huge problem as the city governments have a tendency to inflate their successes mathematically.

Vaggione added that it is problematic to compare cities on a geographical basis as they can be at different stages of development. By that token, it would be unfair to lump together all of Sindh’s cities. How can Sukkur compare with Karachi?

And lastly, Vaggione felt that municipal budgets should be factored in. “Knowing such information would allow [you] to see how cities make use of their resources and hence infer which cities are well managed,” he explained. “Hence, grouping cities by development stage, size and investment capacity could be a good idea.” with input from Saad Hasan

Reading the fine print on rankings

Before you feel too bad about Karachi always sinking to the bottom of the indices, remember that on Mercer’s Quality of Life Index none of the top cities have more than 2.5 million inhabitants, points out Pablo Vaggione, author of ‘Urban Planning for City Leaders’. Measuring them against Karachi that has a population of 20 million seems a bit unfair:

o   Vienna, Austria (1st) 1.7m

o   Zurich, Switzerland (2nd) 392,000

o   Auckland, New Zealand (3rd) 1.2m

o   Munich, Germany (4th) 1.3m

o   Vancouver, Canada (5th) 600,000

Published in The Express Tribune, January 21^st, 2013.