“Best Cities” rankings push “picket fence” ideal

Releasing lists of rankings has become a sure-fire way for magazines to drive readership. After all, who can resist seeing how their city, college, company, or favorite celebrity rates? City rankings have particularly proliferated, with many magazines and nonprofits creating rankings purporting to choose the “Best Places to Live” or “Greenest Cities.” These rankings also bring into stark relief the anti-urban biases in our culture, even among environmental activists.

CNN Money recently released their 2009 Best Places to Live list. The methodology simply assumes up front that only small towns can be the best places to live; they considered only towns from 8,500 to 50,000 people. Many of the writeups tout the “small town feel.” Certainly some people prefer small towns, and a list of “best small towns” could serve them well, but CNN Money’s editors didn’t appear to consider the inherent judgment in calling this list the best places, period.

More worrisome is NRDC’s “Smarter Cities” report, which ranks large cities on their eco-friendliness. Seattle, Portland, and the three cities of the SF Bay Area top the list. It’s a good idea to call attention to cities’ green practices, but their methodology, too, reveals some deep biases about the “ideal” city. The “standard of living” score boosts cities with higher homeownership rates, which often correlates with single-family detached suburban houses.

The “green space” score asks people taking a survey to estimate the percentage of green space in their city. The more suburban a city, the more “green space” people are likely to estimate, even if most of that green space constitutes grassy berms in between parking lots. And finally, any transportation score which ranks Seattle, with no rail transit system whatsoever, above New York and the highest mode split in the nation, is a bad metric. In this case, the score simply asked respondents how many different types of transportation they had access to, without determining how convenient they were or how many people used them.

DC deserves low marks for our terrible energy generation, which burns more coal and emits more pollution than other areas. But too many in the environmental movement seem to see LEED certified houses with some trees in between as an ideal green form of living. Given that a third of our emissions come from cars, NRDC is doing the nation a disservice with their sloppy and misleading rankings.