Measuring the city’s progress
Understanding how well the city is doing in achieving its Community Outcomes is the job of the monitoring and research team at the Christchurch City Council.
The team is currently collecting information that will measure the city’s progress towards the Community Outcomes — called indicators.
As the Community Outcomes cover social, environmental, economic and cultural elements of the City, information covering all these areas needs to be collected from a wide range of sources.
The monitoring and research team uses data from surveys and information collected by the City Council – things such as numbers of people recycling, building consents granted, and numbers of people contributing to public consultations.
ECan provides other information, including air-quality data. The Council’s monitoring and research team also taps into a range of central government information from departments like Statistics NZ, the ministries of Health and Education, from Land Transport NZ and the Police. Christchurch is also takes part in the Quality of Life Survey of big cities in New Zealand and information from this project is also fed into the measurements.
Once indicator information for each Community Outcome is collected, it will be made publicly available on the Council website. The Local Government Act 2003 requires the Council to report every three years on the City’s progress towards the Community Outcomes.
“By monitoring progress towards Community Outcomes we should be able to see if the city’s heading in the right direction and how much progress we have made to achieving the City the community wants,” says David Price, senior research advisor.
For examples of some of the ways we could help check progress, let’s consider the Attractive and Well Designed City outcome. ECan’s regular surveys of public transport use would be one element. One way to assess progress on the Lifelong Learning City goal would be to look at changes in the numbers of residents with formal qualifications. For a Prosperous City, median household income could be a useful indicator.
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Christchurch City Council does regular surveys of cycle use. Information of this type can be used to see how well the
city is performing against the community’s expectations. |
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