The sustainable cities index

With Christmas just over, and with the benefit of some enforced annual leave, the office has been closed for the week so I thought I'd knuckle down to sort out some admin matters.

The posting below was something I added to the Forum for the Future web site following a UK wide report on sustainable cities. This ranked Brighton top and Liverpool twentieth out of twenty. You will see that I don’t agree with the analysis at all. I know both places well so feel qualified to add something to the debate. My posting was made on 25 October, so apologies for the delay in adding it here, but I have just today found an old email where I'd pasted the comments to a friend. Thus I reproduce my comments exactly as I wrote them: -

The sustainable cities index - Re Bottom and Top
I work in Liverpool and had family in Brighton. I know and love both. BUT have you tried to drive in Brighton? It is clogged beyond belief with cars. It has nice parks and a seashore, and much good facadism, but is the substance underneath that good? If yes; how come so many of its residents commute to London?
Liverpool on the other hand has the lowest ratio of car ownership and highest ratio of bus use in the UK. OK, poverty has much to do with this but City centre traffic is light.
Liverpool also has the most efficient rail network in the UK outside the Isle of Wight, and did all that it could to deliver a new tram network until HM Gov restricted its funding support.
It has a progressive unitary waste collection network and the Mersey is now one of the cleanest rivers in the UK, with plans for a tidal electricity barrage to support the two massive windfarms that reside off shore. It also has several cutting edge environmental buildings. So what were the researchers looking at when they came here?
Yes, we have some complex social issues, but there is no way you can compare a small provincial seaside town with a large metropolitan city. Take this into account and Liverpool tops Brighton every time.

This last sentence is something of an innuendo, given the gay abandoned nature of Brighton! It was mischievous rather than malicious, but I was pleased to see it passed the web sensors

My original posting can be found on the following website
http://www.forumforthefuture.org.uk/node/886

It says a lot about scientific rationality that factors such as those I refer to are somehow irrelevant in a scientific analysis of sustainable places.

I could have also added how much of Liverpool’s historic capital is still around today. In other words the City's historic capital well sunk as far as future value is concerned as much of it remains and is still used. This is a reference to Liverpool's historic city centre building stock. Despite Luftwaffe devastation, much of this survived the fads and fashions of the 1960’s and 1970’s, that elsewhere in the UK saw the destruction of many old city centre buildings and their replacement with monolithic shopping malls, precinct commercial districts, and stilted urban motorways.

I might also have added how Liverpool used the tide and wind as the basis of its maritime and commercial success and added that a City of expansive movement requires systems of expansive movement, and thus the Liverpool area saw the initiation of the world's earliest commercial canals, passenger railways, and urban trams. I know we can’t use the past to assure the future, but we need the past to understand the present, and Liverpool today is doing as much as anywhere to go beyond this and consider a sustainable future