ARCHICOB
On the measurement of urbanism, and the weighting of civilisational value in the Gulf.
A published article I read recently argues that the region must move beyond the delivery of spectacular assets toward the creation of complete, functioning urban systems. It is a serious and valuable contribution, and it proposes an instrument — an index of urban performance, referred to throughout this essay simply as the Index — to measure that transition.
This essay accepts the article's ambition and contests its arithmetic. The two are not the same thing, and the difference between them will shape what the Gulf builds for the next quarter-century.
An index is never a neutral mirror held up to the world. It is a normative statement about what deserves to be counted, expressed in the one language that institutions cannot ignore: a number.
In the Gulf more than almost anywhere else, this matters. Our region moves quickly, funds decisively, and benchmarks relentlessly. A framework that acquires credibility here does not remain an academic curiosity. It migrates — into board presentations, into ministerial dashboards, into masterplan competition briefs, into the evaluation criteria by which consultants are appointed and land is released.
Which is to say: an index does not describe cities. In time, it commissions them.
This is the reason a weighting table deserves the same scrutiny we would give to a development brief, because within a few procurement cycles that is precisely what it becomes. Goodhart's caution applies with unusual force in an environment of this speed and this capital: once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to function as a measure. If we tell a region as capable as ours that resilience infrastructure is worth thirty per cent and human life is worth seven, we should not be surprised when, a decade from now, we are surrounded by immaculately serviced districts that nobody has any particular reason to love.
So the question I want to put is not whether the Index is intelligent. It is. The question is whether its weighting encodes the civilisation the article itself is arguing for.
I do not believe it does. Not yet.
The Index evaluates urban developments across twelve dimensions and sixty key performance indicators, each dimension carrying a fixed weight and the whole aggregated into a single score out of one hundred. Developments are scored against declared plans and published commitments, and the results are expressed as a ranking.
The weighting, as reported, distributes as follows.
Two structural features follow from this table, and both matter for everything that comes after.
The first is that every dimension is treated as commensurable with every other. Strategy, identity and human value sit in the same column as waste, water and digital infrastructure, differing only by a few percentage points. The second is that the aggregation is additive, which means the dimensions are not merely comparable but exchangeable. I will return to what that implies.
The dimensions themselves are well chosen, and the indicator questions attached to them are, taken individually, intelligently framed. The question posed under human value — whether the city is affordable, safe, inclusive, healthy and worth remaining in — could stand as the test for the entire exercise. What happens to it is a matter of ranking, not of drafting.
Read generously — and it deserves to be read generously — this is a serious instrument, and it does something the region genuinely needed. It shifts attention from the individual asset to the system. It insists that a development be judged on whether it works as a settlement rather than on whether it photographs well. It makes performance discussable in a language that ministries and boards can act upon, which is not a small achievement.
My argument is not with its existence. It is with its hierarchy.
Every framework contains two philosophies: the one it declares in prose, and the one it enforces in arithmetic. Where these diverge, the arithmetic always wins, because the arithmetic is what gets scored, published, ranked and cited.
The declared philosophy of the article is genuinely ambitious and genuinely human-centred. It insists that a city is not a collection of projects; that delivery is not urbanism; that the region must graduate from the asset to the system.
The encoded philosophy is narrower. Read through its weights, the index evaluates the city predominantly as an infrastructure and operational system — a machine to be audited for continuity of service — rather than as a human, cultural and civilisational construct. Water, energy and resilience together account for thirty per cent, while strategy, identity and human value together account for twenty-two.
Ranked, the table states its priorities plainly. Four dimensions sit at the top on ten per cent each: economy, water, energy and resilience. Five follow at eight: strategy, governance, connectivity, mobility and mixed use. Identity and human value share tenth position at seven, and only digital, at six, is ranked beneath them.
Which is to say that human value — the dimension asking whether the city is affordable, safe, inclusive, healthy and worth remaining in — stands eleventh of twelve. It is ranked one point above sensor networks and three points below the economy.
That is not a rounding difference. That is a worldview.
And it produces something valuable but misnamed: an excellent urban infrastructure and operational-resilience index, presented as a measure of urbanism at its highest grade. The distinction matters, because the first is an engineering achievement and the second is a civilisational one.
Strategy is listed as one of twelve dimensions, weighted at eight per cent, as though it were a parallel concern alongside waste management or digital infrastructure. It is not parallel to them. It is anterior to them. Strategy is the intellectual foundation from which nearly every other dimension is derived: economic purpose, demographic profile, land use, mobility structure, resource security, identity, governance, phasing, and the long-term social proposition.
Before the urbanist draws the first line, a set of questions must already have been answered:
Who is this city for? Why should it exist at all? What kind of life will it enable? What economy will sustain it once the construction phase ends and the cranes leave? What identity will distinguish it from a competent development that could have been built anywhere? What will make people come — and, far more difficult, what will make them remain?
A masterplan that cannot answer these questions is not underweighted at eight per cent. It is void. Its water strategy is irrelevant, because there is no defensible reason for the water to be there.
This is not a novel position. It is the oldest methodological principle the discipline possesses. Patrick Geddes argued in Cities in Evolution in 1915 that no plan should be drawn until the territory, its people and its economy had been surveyed and understood — diagnosis before treatment, survey before plan. A century later the sequence has been inverted. The image is produced first, the strategy is reverse-engineered afterwards to justify it, and the index arrives last to score the result. A framework that allocates eight per cent to strategy does not correct that inversion. It ratifies it.
This is why strategy cannot be scored as a component. It must operate as a governing layer — a precondition and a gate — through which every other dimension is interpreted. A city with a coherent strategic proposition and imperfect infrastructure is a project with a future; infrastructure is a solvable problem and always has been. A city with flawless infrastructure and no strategic proposition is a very expensive settlement waiting for someone to explain it to the people who live there.
Connectivity, mobility and mixed use each receive eight per cent. Together they reach twenty-four, which is a considerably more defensible figure, and I want to give the framework credit for it. But the division is itself revealing. It distributes across three parallel categories what is in truth a single structural question: whether the ordinary business of life can be conducted without compulsory dependence on a car.
The Index asks, under mobility, whether residents can reach their daily needs; and under mixed use, whether housing, jobs, services and civic life are combined across the day. These are not two questions. They are one question examined from either end, and separating them lets a development score respectably on each while failing at the thing both are trying to measure.
The historical record is unambiguous on this point. The grid, the boulevard, the transit corridor, the souq, the arcade and the ring road are not decorations laid over a finished plan. They are the plan. The relationship between housing, employment, education, commerce, culture and public life is fundamentally determined by accessibility — by who can reach what, at what cost, in what time, at what age, and in what climate.
The objection is more than a century old. Camillo Sitte's argument in 1889 was that the modern plan had been surrendered to traffic engineering and land subdivision, and that the city produced by that surrender had lost the spatial and social qualities which made earlier ones inhabitable. Léon Krier's reconstruction of the urban quarter, and Jan Gehl's insistence that we should establish life first, then space, then buildings, are restatements of the same principle in our own century.
Circulation does not serve urban form. It constitutes it.
In the Gulf this is not a theoretical concern. Ours is a region where the difference between a fifteen-minute walk and a fifteen-minute drive is, for four months of the year, the difference between a public realm that exists and one that does not. Shade, distance, cooling, transit frequency and pedestrian continuity are not amenities here. They are the preconditions of urban life.
A city whose inhabitants cannot conveniently reach their daily needs may function technically. It does not function urbanistically.
Identity receives seven per cent, which places it, in the framework's implicit exchange rate, marginally below the systems that manage waste.
Identity is not a decorative cultural layer applied once the engineering has been resolved. It is the mechanism by which a development becomes a place. Cities are not remembered because their utilities operated efficiently. They are remembered because they expressed a recognisable relationship between people, history, climate, geography, architecture and collective aspiration.
This is the discipline's oldest and most reliable evidence. No one travels to see a district's redundancy strategy. They travel to see what a society understood itself to be, and had the conviction to build in permanent material.
Aldo Rossi gave this its most rigorous formulation. The city, in his account, is an artefact constructed over time by collective memory — composed of permanences, the monuments and structures that hold and transmit meaning, and of a fabric that renews itself around them. Its character resides in the locus: the specific and unrepeatable relationship between a site and everything that has happened upon it. Christian Norberg-Schulz reached a comparable position from phenomenology, arguing that a place possesses a genius loci which architecture either reveals or extinguishes, and that the failure of much modern development is precisely a failure to reveal it.
Neither position is nostalgic, and neither is decorative. Both are structural claims: that a settlement without permanences and without a locus does not accumulate meaning, and that what does not accumulate meaning does not, over the long term, accumulate value either. This should be of the greatest possible interest to anyone underwriting a fifty-year development programme.
Without identity, even a highly efficient urban system risks interchangeability — another technically sophisticated development that could have been assembled in any latitude, from any catalogue, for any client. In a region currently producing urban product at unprecedented volume and speed, interchangeability is not a minor aesthetic risk. It is the principal long-term threat to asset value, to cultural continuity, and to the civilisational argument the Gulf is otherwise making with real conviction.
The most surprising weight in the framework is Human Value, also at seven per cent.
The question attached to that dimension is, by some distance, the most important question in the entire instrument: Is the city affordable, safe, inclusive, healthy and worth remaining in?
If that is the ultimate test, how can it constitute seven per cent of the score, and stand eleventh of twelve? Are we not, before anything else, designing cities for human beings?
What of the people who must inhabit these environments every day — their dignity, their emotions, their relationships, their traditions, their aspirations, their economic realities, their sense of belonging? What of children, of families, of older residents, of the workers who build and maintain the city and must also be able to live in it? What of loneliness, social cohesion, cultural continuity, adaptability, and the ordinary pleasure of living well?
A city may possess secure water, renewable energy, advanced digital infrastructure and formidable resilience systems, and still fail completely as a place to live. We can all name examples. Some of them are recent, and some of them are close to home.
Infrastructure keeps a city operating. It cannot, by itself, make a city worth inhabiting.
There is a well-developed intellectual tradition behind this position, and it begins at the origin of the discipline. Aristotle's formulation in the Politics is the earliest statement of the distinction I am pressing: the city comes into being so that people may live, and endures so that they may live well. Existence is the means. The good life is the end. A great deal of what has been written since is commentary on that sentence.
The modern line is no less clear. Sen's capability approach measures a society by what it enables people to be and to do, rather than by what it has installed. Jacobs described the fine grain of ordinary urban life and the conditions under which it survives contact with planning. Lynch treated the city as an image held in the minds of its inhabitants, and judged it by the legibility of that image. Lefebvre argued that the city carries both a use value and an exchange value, and that when the second consumes the first, the inhabitant is progressively displaced from the place their own labour produced — the argument underlying the right to the city, and one that any framework claiming to assess affordability and inclusion must eventually meet. Bernardo Secchi, writing towards the end of his life on the city of the rich and the city of the poor, put the matter in a form our region cannot afford to ignore: inequality is not a social externality of the urban project. It is one of its physical outputs, produced by decisions about land, transport and housing taken long before anyone is actually excluded.
None of this is exotic. It is the mainstream of urban thought, European and otherwise, and it is taught in every serious school. What is striking is how little of it survives translation into the weighting tables our region now uses to evaluate itself.
Beyond the weights, four technical questions deserve consideration. The first three are questions of construction. The fourth, I believe, is the deepest flaw in the instrument as it stands.
The index compares metropolitan strategies, new cities, heritage destinations, economic zones and individual urban districts — profoundly different territorial and institutional conditions, with different mandates, timescales, populations and degrees of sovereign control. The article acknowledges this limitation honestly. But acknowledgement in the text does not neutralise the effect of the table: converting these conditions into a single ordinal ranking still manufactures an impression of equivalence that is difficult to defend. A district cannot outperform a metropolis at being a metropolis, and a heritage city was never attempting the same task as an economic zone.
01Scores derived largely from published masterplans and declared commitments risk measuring the quality and confidence of public communication rather than the quality of urban performance. In a region with sophisticated development marketing, this is not a hypothetical distortion. It systematically advantages the well-documented over the well-built, and the announced over the inhabited.
02A score of 98 out of 100 asserts a degree of resolution that cannot be sustained without audited, longitudinal evidence covering affordability, resident satisfaction, economic diversity, social integration and performance over time. Two significant figures imply a measurement instrument we do not yet possess. Bands would be honest. Decimals are not.
03This is the one that concerns me most, and it is the least visible. A weighted additive index — the standard construction, and evidently the one used here — permits full substitution between dimensions. In such a model, weights are not statements of importance; they are exchange rates. They define the terms on which a deficiency in one dimension may be purchased with a surplus in another. Under this arithmetic, a development that is unaffordable, socially exclusionary and culturally anonymous can compensate for those failures through exceptional water security and digital infrastructure, and still rank highly.
04It can fail as a place to live, and pass as a city.
This is not a marginal technical objection. It is the mathematical expression of exactly the confusion the article set out to correct. The methodological literature is unambiguous here: the OECD and Joint Research Centre handbook on composite indicators treats the choice between compensatory and non-compensatory aggregation as a normative decision that must be declared rather than a technical default, and Giuseppe Munda's work on multi-criteria evaluation demonstrates that where dimensions are not genuinely substitutable — as human dignity and desalination capacity are not — linear aggregation yields rankings that are arithmetically valid and substantively meaningless.
And there is well-established precedent for repairing it: the Human Development Index moved from an arithmetic to a geometric mean in 2010 for precisely this reason — to ensure that poor performance in one dimension could no longer be fully offset by strength in another. A framework that intends to measure urbanism rather than infrastructure needs the same correction, and needs it in the aggregation logic, not in the accompanying prose.
Criticism without an alternative is commentary. Let me therefore state what I believe a defensible instrument would look like. It requires reorganising the framework around a distinction the current version blurs — the distinction between means and ends.
Water, energy, mobility, waste, digital systems and resilience are means. Human flourishing, belonging, opportunity, cultural continuity and quality of life are ends. This does not diminish the means. It places them within their proper urban purpose, which is the only place they have ever had.
Before scoring begins, the proposition must answer for itself: purpose, population, economic engine beyond construction, identity, governance model, phasing, and the long-term social proposition. This tier is not scored on a hundred-point scale; it is passed or it is not. A development that cannot articulate why it should exist does not proceed to evaluation. This resolves the structural error of treating strategy as one dimension among twelve.
GateHuman value, identity and belonging, affordability and inclusion, cultural continuity, economic diversification, health and safety, and the retention of residents across generations. These are the purposes for which cities are built, and they should dominate the arithmetic.
MajorityWater, energy, resilience, mobility, connectivity, digital and environmental systems — assessed rigorously, and assessed as the enabling substrate they are.
RemainderThree further corrections make the instrument honest.
Geometric rather than arithmetic aggregation across tiers, with a floor beneath each Tier 1 dimension. A city that fails on affordability or belonging cannot buy its way back to a high score with utilities. This is the single most important change available.
Each score should carry a declared evidence class: declared, designed, delivered, demonstrated. Scores from different evidence classes should never be aggregated into a single number without disclosure. This addresses the disclosure problem, and it rewards the built over the promised.
Assess like against like — metropolitan strategies against metropolitan strategies, districts against districts — and report performance in bands with stated confidence, rather than a false-precision ranking that invites headlines and discourages honesty.
None of this is difficult to implement. It is only difficult to accept, because it produces less quotable results. That is generally a sign of a better instrument.
A city is a massive cultural interpretation of a civilisation. Like architecture, it extends far beyond engineering, utilities and economic performance. It embodies what a society values, how it chooses to live, and what it intends to leave behind. Water, energy, resilience and economics are indispensable — but they should already have been reconciled at the highest strategic level before the pen touches the paper. That reconciliation is precisely what urbanism at its highest grade must solve, and precisely what the finest urbanists must be capable of integrating.
Which returns me to the question underneath all of this, and the reason the weighting table is worth this much attention.
Who is deciding what our cities are for?
In practice, increasingly, it is whoever writes the evaluation criteria. Frameworks of this kind do not merely rank the Gulf's ambitions; over time they define them, because they determine what a development team must optimise in order to be judged successful. That is real authorship, exercised quietly, and it deserves to be recognised as such — by those who build these instruments, and by those of us who work under them.
So the framework's central question should, I believe, be reframed. Not only: Can this development function as a city? But also:
Does this city deserve to exist — and will human beings genuinely wish to call it home?
The first question can be answered by an engineer, and answered well. The second requires a civilisation to state what it believes. The Gulf is entirely capable of answering both. We should make certain that the instruments we adopt actually ask.
Aristotle, Politics, Book I.
Camillo Sitte, Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen (1889).
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1915).
Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (1960); Good City Form (1981).
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
Aldo Rossi, L'architettura della città (1966).
Henri Lefebvre, Le Droit à la ville (1968); La Production de l'espace (1974).
Jan Gehl, Livet mellem husene / Life Between Buildings (1971).
Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1979).
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999).
Léon Krier, The Architecture of Community (2009).
OECD & Joint Research Centre, Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators (2008).
Giuseppe Munda, Social Multi-Criteria Evaluation for a Sustainable Economy (2008).
Bernardo Secchi, La città dei ricchi e la città dei poveri (2013).
Jacques El Moallem, Founder & Principal Architect & Urbanist
ARCHICOB · The Journal · Editorial
Dubai · 2026 · English
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