What Is a City Health Index? A Practical Introduction
I once fell off my bike in a suburb of Gothenburg because a tree root had turned the pavement into a ramp. Not a small ramp. A launch ramp. I flew. I landed. I stared at the sky and thought: someone, somewhere, has a spreadsheet that says this road is "acceptable."
That is the lie the City Health Index was built to kill. Not with opinions. With boots on the ground and eyes that actually look. Thousands of observations, street by street, lamp by lamp, crack by crack. Boiled down to a single number that tells you what is real.
What the index measures
We look at six things. Six dimensions of physical reality that bureaucracies pretend to track but usually do not:
Road condition. Not "satisfactory" or "under review." Actual potholes. Actual cracks. Actual markings so faded they might as well be abstract art. We count them. We photograph them. We know exactly how many coffee cups of water each one holds after rain.
Lighting infrastructure. A street lamp that does not work is not a "lighting deficiency." It is a dark patch where someone could get hurt. We check every single one. We know which ones flicker, which ones are dead, which ones have been dead so long the locals stopped reporting them.
Signage and wayfinding. Can you read it? Is it bent? Is a tree growing through it? These are not aesthetic questions. A driver who misses a turn because a sign is obscured becomes a statistic. We document the obscurity before it becomes the statistic.
Public assets. Benches with no seats. Bus shelters with no glass. Bike racks rusted into modern sculpture. We count what is there, what is broken, and what has been removed without anyone updating the inventory. Because someone always "forgets" to update the inventory.
Vegetation management. Trees are beautiful until they block sightlines at intersections or crack the pavement into launch ramps. We love trees. We also love not falling off bikes. There is a balance, and most cities have lost it.
Utility access. Manholes without covers. Cabinets with doors hanging off. Hydrants buried under weeds. These are the things that do not make the news until they make the news catastrophically. We find them first.
How the score is built
Each dimension gets a 0–100 score based on what we actually saw. Not what was reported. Not what was planned. What was there, on that day, in that light, from that angle. The overall index is a weighted average, and here is the beautiful part: you can change the weights.
A municipality cares about roads? Weight them higher. An insurer worries about liability from bad lighting? Weight that. The score adapts to what you actually care about, not what some consultant decided everyone should care about in 2017.
And every number is traceable. A district score of 73 is not a black box. It is a folder full of photos, coordinates, timestamps, and confidence ratings. You can argue with it. You can verify it. You can send your own people out to check. We encourage it. Truth fears no inspection.
Why a single number matters
People love to hate composite scores. "It hides the detail," they say. Wrong. A transparent composite score makes comparison possible for the first time. District A versus District B. This city versus that city. This quarter versus last quarter.
Without a standard, every organisation builds its own incompatible fantasy. The roads department has one spreadsheet. The parks department has another. Neither talks to the other. Neither uses the same definitions. It is like comparing temperatures in Celsius and Fahrenheit and wondering why the building keeps catching fire.
A single number, built the same way everywhere, cuts through that noise. It is not the whole story. It is the headline. And sometimes the headline is all the politician reads before deciding where the money goes.
From index to action
The score is not the end. It is the beginning. A lighting score of 34 in postcode 12345 tells the maintenance team exactly where to start. Not "somewhere in the north district." Not "we will get to it next fiscal year." Here. This street. These lamps. This week.
A declining road score, month after month, is not a trend line on a dashboard. It is a countdown. Fix it now or fix it later at ten times the cost, probably in the middle of winter, probably during an election year, probably with cameras rolling. The index gives you the warning. What you do with it is up to you.
Request a pilot →