Improving City Performance Through Benchmarking
Improving City Performance Through Benchmarking
Presented at the International Cities Town Centres & Communities Society Conference ICTC 2008
The term ‘benchmarking’ was first conceptualised in business management to describe the process where a firm would identify best practice by comparing its performance against other firms. Since then, the benchmarking process has expanded to measure and monitor performance of a whole range of processes, projects and outcomes, particularly government functions and policy.
In recent years, a number of international benchmarking studies have been published, assessing the relative performance of cities across a variety of urban issues. These include quality of life surveys, cost of living surveys and others that measure specific issues ranging from housing affordability to city governance. While cities that rate highly on these indictors promote them in city marketing, these large scale benchmarking studies have limited value to inform public policy.
This paper outlines how benchmarking exercises can be specifically tailored to understand the performance of cities in line with strategic outcomes and provide a basis for informing urban policy. It highlights:
-
Limitations of large scale international benchmarking exercises
-
Key considerations for designing customised city benchmarking exercises
-
How the results can be used to inform policy
-
A basis for ongoing performance monitoring
Lessons from the recent application of city benchmarking to review Auckland’s performance against Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Vancouver and Wellington illustrate the practical application of the concepts presented in the paper.
Read the full paper.
More information about the International Cities Town Centres & Communities Society and conferences is at http://www.ictcsociety.org.
