One of the symptoms of professional journalism's decline is an increasing reversion to lists and rankings for various news items and cultural events. These lists seem to pop up with greater frequency toward the end of the year (Top moments in reality TV, top moments in the presidential campaigns, top songs of the year, etc.) The primary reason for this is simply that informative, investigative journalism requires either expertise or a great deal of research - both of which are expensive. The days of in-depth reporting - of journalists who knew the characters and dynamics of the places they lived - are almost history. Apart from cities that have large enough populations to support alternative newspapers and websites, local journalism itself is almost history.
For large national publications with writers who are experts at nothing in particular - it is far easier, cheaper and more profitable to do a cursory glance at some statistics and generate a list or ranking based on an excel metric. The places that we live and work are not immune to this obtuse, shallow form of data-smog. Not a week goes by without a major news source publishing a meaningless list with a couple paragraphs of shallow observation. Travel magazines do this frequently, but so do publications like Forbes and Atlantic Cities. Apart from clear quantitative analysis measures like population, ethnicity, income distribution, etc. (things that the Census measures) - the vast majority of the lists that masquerade as information about cities are completely meaningless. Lists for the "happiest, coolest, most well-educated" or "best" - are laughably immaterial.
Not only are many of these qualities subjective, the lists themselves are often comparing apples to oranges. The most egregious error that almost every list makes is to rank cities in absolute terms (the most creative) when measuring by relative statistics - the average number of Starbucks per person. This relative measure automatically rules out any city of significant socio-economic diversity and ignores the effects of critical mass. A small college town may have more Starbucks per person than New York, but it certainly doesn't have the critical mass of relationships and talent to invent in the same manner.
Everything depends on how one defines a city - or what you would call a "population" in statistics. Is a city defined by municipal limits or an entire metropolitan area? Either way there are huge problems comparing cities in different parts of the country (with different historical circumstances) to each other. For example; older cities of the North and Upper Midwest were the first to by hemmed in by Home Rule laws that allowed townships and small municipalities to prevent annexation by the central city. No such limitation exists on newer cities like Houston, that continue to annex their periphery into already sprawling municiple boundaries. Thus, through historical development patterns different cities encompass different scopes and mixtures of their overall metropolitan population. Many older cities, like Chicago, remain defined as much by their working class neighborhoods and slums as they are by their beautifully gentrified quarters.
As a result of college towns and geographically small, extensively gentrified cities like Boston, San Francisco and Seattle tend to dominate "livability" measures. America's largest, most diverse cities - New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are almost always near the bottom of these lists and rankings - even though they each contain several neighborhoods that, if considered independently, would out-rank their smaller competitors by leaps and bounds. For example; you can fit Boston (48 sq. mi) and Manhattan (22 sq. mi) inside the city limits of Chicago (227 sq. mi) and still have room left over for Detroit (138 sq. mi). Incidentally Boston + Manhattan + Detroit roughly equals Chicago in population. Los Angeles is geographically the size of two Chicagos. Houston and Phoenix are both as big as Los Angeles and Detroit combined.
Large cities with large working class and poor populations inevitably score poorly on these lists precisely because the they target the kind of generic qualities that define upper middle class urbanity. They say nothing of a city's character, its history, its assets or its opportunities. Lists say nothing about the relationships and networks of people and capital that define the city.
Almost every list suffers from confirmation bias - or the tendency to favor information that confirms preexisting beliefs. The creation of a city list or ranking probably says more about the perceptions of the publication or author than it does about the cities in question. Each lists reveals the criteria that a publication deems relevant to the definition of whatever quality they're ranking. The bias and subjectivity of these findings was most egregious in a recent "Coolest Cities" list created by Forbes. Houston certainly come to most people's mind when thinking of a cool city, but Forbes, a conservative financial magazine has clear motivations behind picking a bland, sprawling, southern "Red" city ahead of traditionally urban, liberal oasis. To achieve this "cool city" coup they simply used metrics like unemployment rate, age of home ownership and population growth - which have more to do with job growth and affordability than anything else.
The point, once again, is obviously not to report or inform us about the condition of metropolitan America - it is to call our attention to relatively meaningless bits of information that confirm rather than challenge the reader's perception of cities. Forbes doesn't want all of its conservative suburban readers feeling uncool while they tour the golf course, so it tells them what they want to hear - that they're just as cool - actually, this year they're cooler - than the fashion whores in New York City. Of course, in my book both of them are lame.
Almost every list, in other words, is bullshit. Unfortunately its often the only substitute people have for any real knowledge about America's cities.
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