Methodology
How Global City Intelligence distinguishes modelled scores, editorial indicators, country assumptions and source-backed datasets, with their limitations.
GCI scores and planning amounts are modelled or editorial indicators, not measured city statistics or official estimates. Country assumptions are not local observations. Institutional references explain context; they do not supply these scores.
Measured: an observation with an identified instrument or collection method, geography and period. Do not interpret GCI scores as measured data.
Official estimate: a figure published by an identified statistical authority, with its definition and reference period. The country GDP snapshot below is separate from GCI city scores.
Modelled / editorial: legacy city and module indicators are seed values; phase profiles are deterministic planning models derived from assumptions, including country priors. They are not surveys of current rents, crime records, clinical outcomes or school performance. Ranking these values does not turn them into observed statistics.
Country fallback: an assumption shared across cities in a country or region. It cannot support a claim about neighbourhood conditions or a precise local price. No measured confidence interval is available for these GCI indicators.
Safety indicators: the legacy safety module is a separate seed indicator. The quality-of-life safety composite combines modelled low-crime (32%), personal safety (30%), night safety (20%) and road safety (18%) components. The personal-safety component alone is not the composite. Neither is an observed crime rate or individual risk estimate.
Climate reference: selected city pages include NASA POWER / MERRA-2 temperature climatology for 2001–2025, with the exact API response and coordinates. This is gridded reanalysis, not a station observation. It remains separate from GCI planning temperatures and comfort scores; it does not validate them.
Dates: the content review date records a substantive page or provenance change, not a fresh measurement. GCI model data year denotes an edition; external datasets retain their own reference periods. The reviewed pilot uses matching visible, metadata and sitemap dates, with source-content fingerprints checked before release. Historical dates outside the pilot have not yet been reconciled.
Coverage: source-level provenance review currently covers Shanghai, Paris, Cairo, Durham (United States), Berlin, Lisbon, Porto and Prague. Current rent, crime, education and healthcare figures have not been independently verified for this pilot. The institutional links below provide methodological background, not evidence for every number on the site.
These are categories in the legacy editorial framework, not a common weighting formula for every score. Each phase model has its own assumptions.
| Metric | Value | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Affordability | Editorial indicator | Housing pressure, daily essentials, transport dependency, and service access. |
| Air quality | Editorial indicator | Air-quality orientation; the legacy score is not a retrieved monitoring-station series. |
| Energy readiness | Editorial indicator | Clean-energy transition capacity, grid resilience, climate stress, and renewable-resource context. |
| Urban resilience | Editorial indicator | 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.
These publications provide background context, not the underlying city values or an endorsement of GCI scores. 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.
Background reference only. Do not attribute the modelled city scores to this publisher.
Background reference only. Do not attribute the modelled city scores to this publisher.
Background reference only. Do not attribute the modelled city scores to this publisher.
Background reference only. Do not attribute the modelled city scores to this publisher.