Perm to Become Pilot City in Adaptation of International City Prosperity Index (CPI) in Russia

HSE University specialists have joined the Adaptation of UN City Development Indices project. The first working meeting took place at HSE-Perm on May 13.

The meeting was attended by the supervisor of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) in Russia, Tatyana Khabarova; the director of the HSE’s Institute of Regional Studies and Urban Planning (Moscow), Irina Ilina; and Associate Professor of the HSE-Perm’s School of Management and lecturer of the educational programme ‘Public Administration’, Anastasiya Bozhya-Volya. Luis Herrera Favela, coordinator of the CPI (City Prosperity Index) Initiative, also took part in the meeting remotely and presented a detailed programme of the remaining project work.

On May 14, an organizational meeting was held at the City Council of Perm, where the significance of the project for the city's development, problems of today’s municipal statistics, and prospects of joint work on the project were discussed.

As part of the project, Perm will be the pilot city in adapting the international City Prosperity Index to the structural specifics of the Russian municipal administration and its statistical data system.

In the future, CPI calculation methods will be applied to Russia’s largest cities, which will in turn allow researchers to compare the quality of life not only amongst Russian cities, but foreign cities all over the world as well.

The City Prosperity Index includes a composite index that measures how cities create and distribute social and economic benefits. It collects and analyses data in accordance with more than 64 city indices in addition to specific factors of a given city in order to take the unique demands of each city into account.

The CPI offers a comprehensive overview of cities’ development with the use of three distinct features:

- a flexible monitoring system that takes specific demands and features of a city into account;

- an innovative tool based on spatial analysis which unites such indices as connectivity of streets, public space, and city expansion;

- as a multi-purpose tool, the CPI can serve as the basis for implementing changes in monitoring and municipal policy.

The Adaptation of the UN City Development Indices project also suggests the harmonization of the CPI with the key performance indicators (KPI) for urban development, which are currently used by the UN and were developed by the United Nations International Telecommunication Union and the UN Economic Commission for Europe.