city ranking, rating

Why New York City Is 'Average': Researchers Want to Improve How We Determine Urban Exceptionality

The researchers have shown, in fact, that with each doubling of city population, each inhabitant is, on average, 15 percent wealthier, 15 percent more productive, 15 percent more innovative, and 15 percent more likely to be victimized by violent crime, regardless of the city's geography or the decade in which you pull the data. Scientists call this phenomenon "superlinear scaling."

"Almost anything you can measure about a city scales nonlinearly," Bettencourt says. "This is the reason we have cities in the first place. But if you don't correct for these effects, you are not capturing the essence of particular places."
As part of their study, the researchers developed scale-adjusted metropolitan indicators (SAMIs) that allowed them to compare the socioeconomic performance of large, midsized, and smaller U.S. cities.
And they found that highly exceptional cities tend to be smaller and more monocultural.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101110171335.htm