Presentation from the InGRID Expert Workshop, Livorno June 15-17 2015 Measuring well-being where it matters Towards a place-based approach

1. Measuring Well-Being where it Matters
Towards a Place-based Approach
Giovanni A. Barbieri
June 16, 2015

2. Summary
 Looking back: history from the point of view of losers
 Let’s try to wrap it up
 What about the territorial issues?
 What are places? What is a city?
 Cities, places, daily urban systems: a functional definition
 Places, cities and knowledge
 Why we need a quantitative approach
 Why is this relevant for local well-being
 Elements of a bottom-up approach
 Experiences
 Crowd-sourcing
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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3. Looking back: history from
the point of view of losers
 Palermo 10-13 November 2004: World Forum on Key
Indicators «Statistics, Knowledge and Policy»
 A tool (Trendalyzer: dynamic charts) but also a connection (per
capita GDP and life expectancy at birth or child mortality, wealth
and health
 Istanbul 27-30 June 2007: Measuring and Fostering the
Progress of Societies
 What is progress?
 Brussels 19-20 November 2007: Beyond GDP
 GDP strikes back!
 The Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi report, 14 September 2009
 Classical GDP issues
 Quality of life
 Sustainable development and environment
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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4. Wrapping it up
 GDP as the starting point
 The big ambition – to supersede and substitute GDP as the measure of
wellbeing – has been abandoned in favour of a “reasonable” programme – to
widen the scope of GDP
 Was it a good idea?
 Widening the focus:
 Distributive dimension (measuring the distribution of economic welfare along with
averages)
 Stocks along with flows (in order to elicit vulnerability and sustainability)
 Subjective perceptions (along with objective measures, as a way to add quality of life
to economic welfare)
 In term of indicators:
 A single indicator or a single class of indicators is not sufficient for capturing the
increasing complexity of current societies and economic systems
 Phenomena to keep under observation: from economic growth to quality of life
 Distribution of quality of life and economic items across subjects (individuals, families,
groups, genders and generations)
 Time (implicit in both economic and environmental sustainability)
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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5. What about the territorial
issues?
 From this brief description one dimension is lacking, that of the territory
 Even the “new” economy of well-being in the beginning is space-blind, just as
the “old” neo-classical synthesis
 Many initiatives measuring local well-being
 What is still lacking is a theoretical framework, even a tentative one, that can act as a
guide, or at least as a basis for discussion for all the groups at work
 The risk is that without a common language the results obtained can neither be
compared nor generalized
 Different levels (regional, urban, by functional areas), one place-based perspective
 A dichotomic question:
 Should the construction of objects, dimensions, measurement tools and indicators of
local well-being be a top-down process that favours consistency and comparability
with the national level?
 Or a bottom-up process that enhances the subjective and planning dimension of local
policies?
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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6. What are places? What is a
city?
 Salvatore Scibona, The End: «[P]eople didn’t
mean the same thing when they said “location”
as when they said “place.” They said “place”
meaning the self of the location»
 Places
 A place is where most activities and interactions among
people and socio-economic actors happen
 The result of the spontaneous and (largely)
autonomous organization of the choices and actions of
these actors
 Networks, relationships, exchanges, flows
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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7. What is a city?
 The city comes before the country (Jane Jacobs,
The Economy of Cities)
 A city is made of people, not of buildings
 Civitas (the community of citizens) vs. urbs (the set of
buildings and infrastructure)
 It is men who make the city, not walls or ships without
crew (Nicia)
 What is the city but the people (Shakespeare,
Coriolanus)
 ’tis the men, not the houses, that make the city
(Thomas Fuller)
 Citizens make the city (Rousseau)
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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8. Cities, places, daily urban
systems: a functional definition
 Daily urban systems
 According to Wikipedia, a daily urban system is the area around a city, in which daily
commuting occurs
 According to the Oxford’s Dictionary of Geography, a daily urban system is the
commuting area around a city, varying according to the definition of ‘city’
 Towards a functional definition:
 The concept of daily urban system tends to approximate a functional definition of
urban space, based on the density of social relationships, rather than that of buildings
 Daily commuting as a proxy of the set of social and economic relationships occurring
among people and social actors
 If and when other information is scant, the travel between home and workplace is a
viable proxy for other types of daily commuting (those motivated by study, family
business and leisure)
 The agents of these processes are primarily individuals, and secondly the social and
economic actors in which they are organized
 This self-organization of activities and relationships defines territorial “cells”, both self-
contained and integrated (i.e. relatively impermeable to external flows and highly
interconnected within)
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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9. Places, cities and knowledge
 A few quotes
 A city is a place where time becomes visible and mind takes form (Lewis
Mumford)
 Cities are bibles of stone (Victor Hugo)
 The city is intellect (Spengler)
 The general (and fruitful) ideas behind them:
 Cities are about interactions and exchanges
 At the end of the day, what is exchanged is (mostly at least) information
 DIKW model? well, forget it
 Let’s say (for the purposes of this presentation) that the information as it is
produced and exchanged among (local) actors is a flow, while local
knowledge is a stock
 So there is knowledge in the process of being accumulated on a day by
day basis
 But there is also crystallized, tacit, knowledge embedded in the place itself
(“bibles of stone”)
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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10. Why we need a quantitative
approach
 Let me tell it at least once:
 If I cannot measure it it doesn't exist
 If I cannot measure it I cannot act on it
 This effort is necessary for:
 A programme structure, connecting operationally
objectives, tools, results and outcomes
 A shared toolbox
 A third-party independent evaluation
 The comparability of methods and results
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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11. Why is this relevant for local
well-being
 A “pure” bottom-up approach is not feasible
 We need to “zoom down” to compare problems,
programmes and results and to build a
national/regional hierarchical framework
 We need comparability
 We need to infect other places
 We need to cross-fertilize and to cross-breed
 But a bottom-up approach is nevertheless
necessary
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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12. Elements of a bottom-up
approach
 In a bottom-up approach the key-word is relevance
 But relevance can only be defined with reference to a goal
 An important but elusive concept
 Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of
accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T (Hjørland & Sejer
Christensen,2002)
 In this perspective, what you are interested in assessing is:
 The state of the world (i.e. the present situation)
 The goal (or a set of goals)
 The actions (the tasks) to accomplish the results
 In terms of information, you need:
 To capture the information flows generated by the interactions among the
local actors
 To unearth the knowledge embedded in the places
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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13. Experiences
 Voting with one’s feet
 Lo sviluppo locale che vorrei
 L’isola che c’è (Civitavecchia)
 Bonificare la “terra dei fuochi” (Trentola
Ducenta)
 Corporate barter (Vittorio Veneto)
 Luoghi idea(li)
 Programma di sviluppo della provincia di
Trento (Fondazione Ahref)
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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14. Crowd-sourcing
 Open Street Maps
 OSM, the Wikipedia of cartography
 OSM in disaster relief
 Haiti 2010 earthquake
 Fukushima 2011 disaster
 Nepal 2015 earthquake
 OSMit e Fondazione Bruno Keller: Condividiamo la conoscenza
del territorio (2013)
 Sustainability of urban crowd-sourcing
 Mapping community engagement with urban crowd-sourcing (Hristova et
al. 2012)
 Tailing-off activity and long-term viability
 Network structure and geographical mapping of implicit communities of
contributors
 Spatially clustered crowd-sourcing communities produce higher coverage
than those with looser geographic affinity
Measuring Well-Being where it Matters – G. A. Barbieri
Livorno, June 16 2015
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