By Kaylin Padovano
The urban data revolution is here. From Abidjan to Mumbai to New York, we are beginning to learn about real-time trends: in traffic, land use, even in illegal cooking oil dumping in cities. City data is almost in surplus, and mayors are bombarded with new information on goods and resources every day. Yet little of this data shows us how a city’s most important resource — its people — are living.
Humans continue to migrate to urban areas faster than fragile city infrastructures can handle. With this migration, the number of urban children living in poverty and exclusion continues to rise. At least one of every four children in the world is estimated to live in urban poverty, and children in slums and informal settlements are ignored or simply not counted by typical data measurements. While cities are overflowing with data on their vehicles, structures and businesses, there is a shortage of data on the most vulnerable people who live in them.
This imbalance needs to change. In response, UNICEF and the Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF) have developed the urban child index: a global measurement tool to track and measure the factors that influence childhood development in our cities. For example: a good start to life, protection from harm, education and quality of life.
“Building an urban child index for all cities to use is the first global step towards recognizing the needs of the world’s one billion urban children,” said UNICEF Director of Policy, Jeffrey O’Malley during a plenary session at October’s United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) Congress in Rabat, Morocco, “This data will lead to more and better quality schools and hospitals, more children registered and immunized, more environmentally healthy cities with reduced child respiratory infections, and safer streets.”
Current data on marginalized urban children is scarce to non-existent, even though they often fare worse than even their poorest rural counterparts. For example, in Bangladesh, the under-five mortality rate in slums is 79 per cent higher than the overall urban rate and 44 per cent higher than even the rural rate.
Even in the United States infant mortality rates in urban areas differ neighborhood to neighborhood, sometimes resulting in rates in predominantly poor, minority neighborhoods that are three times as high as those of their wealthy, white peers.
UNICEF’s urban index addresses these inequalities, and gives mayors a valuable snapshot to inform their budgeting and planning decisions. O’Malley stated, “We need to start with city-by-city data and eventually get down to neighborhood-by-neighborhood to accurately count, make visible, and make improvements for the most marginalized urban children.”
The index is the first of its kind to measure conditions as diverse as nutrition, equity, disaster preparedness and air pollution. Utilizing the wealth of data accessible, it builds a more comprehensive picture not just on the hardware of a city, but how children are actually living.
While most indices focus solely on ranking, UNICEF’s tool also holds leaders accountable for making concrete improvements in their municipalities. At the UCLG congress, Mayor Augusto Barrera of Quito welcomed the call for more and better data on children, saying that lack of informed planning can breed violence and unrest among youth populations and that, “We need to build cities for people.”
There is no stopping the urban data revolution, and UNICEF recognizes that the wealth of information it generates is critical to improving cities globally. However, they call upon the world’s major urban partners to assure that it, like any good revolution, has people at its heart.
Next steps: visit the U-KID Urban Index website, and read the Preliminary Pilot Results. For more information, contact Kerry Constabile, UNICEF Urban Specialist.