Creating anything from scratch is more difficult than working from an established base. This is absolutely true when it comes to starting new neighborhoods and communities. What do you build first? What will be the anchors? And how do you balance hard and soft infrastructure to make it an attractive place before a critical mass is achieved?

I was thinking about this over the weekend while walking around Whistler Village, so I tweeted this out. If you've been before, you know it's packed with people all throughout the day. I would characterize it as a successful place.

But the responses I got on Twitter were along the lines of: "Are you joking? It's a fake utopia. It may be busy, but staff are forced to live on the outskirts of the village in dorms."

These comments are not entirely wrong. Resort villages are typically a kind of Disneyland. Attainable workforce housing is a major challenge for resorts, and it's typical to make the building of it a precondition to development. You can't run a resort without staff.

But none of this changes the fact that it is still very difficult to create successful places from scratch. There are lots of ski resorts that don't have the energy of Whistler, and lots of new planned communities that don't have the foot traffic of older neighborhoods. The Canary District in Toronto comes to mind as a place that is still settling in. That is how you know it's challenging.

Creating successful places from scratch requires the right strategy, careful design and programming, patience, and probably the ability to subsidize the right tenants to seed activity early on. It's also helpful if you can avoid going broke before the neighborhood comes alive.

Cover photo by Peter Robbins on

Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity.

With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology being used and the rigor in which it is being applied. In this case, they evaluated each city based on “six pillars of equity”:

1. Place: Perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment
   

2. Product: A city’s key institutions, attraction and infrastructure
   

3. Programming: The arts, culture and entertainment in a city
   

4. People: Immigration and diversity of a city
   

5. Prosperity: Employment, GDP per capita entertainment in a city and corporate head offices
   

6. Promotion: Quantity of articles, references of a city and recommendations online
   

What’s perhaps unique about this study is that it combines measurable statistics with “visitor perception metrics” – data that they mined from social media. Here’s an excerpt from the methodology page:

“Our team became interested in the way visitors and citizens themselves influence the identity and perception of cities. Increasingly, they do it through their evaluation of experiences on social media and via the comments, images and reviews they share with family, friends and people around the world. These opinions and attitudes, much more than traditional marketing, influence the way people perceive places today.”

This is a fascinating shift for city brands and is something that we have discussed before on this blog. All of us are now involved in telling the story of the places in which we live and visit.

The entire report is well done and worth a read. It’s also a free download (you’ll need to enter your contact info). But below are the top 10 world’s best city brands. Not really any surprises for me. What about for you?

Creating anything from scratch is more difficult than working from an established base. This is absolutely true when it comes to starting new neighborhoods and communities. What do you build first? What will be the anchors? And how do you balance hard and soft infrastructure to make it an attractive place before a critical mass is achieved?

I was thinking about this over the weekend while walking around Whistler Village, so I tweeted this out. If you've been before, you know it's packed with people all throughout the day. I would characterize it as a successful place.

But the responses I got on Twitter were along the lines of: "Are you joking? It's a fake utopia. It may be busy, but staff are forced to live on the outskirts of the village in dorms."

These comments are not entirely wrong. Resort villages are typically a kind of Disneyland. Attainable workforce housing is a major challenge for resorts, and it's typical to make the building of it a precondition to development. You can't run a resort without staff.

But none of this changes the fact that it is still very difficult to create successful places from scratch. There are lots of ski resorts that don't have the energy of Whistler, and lots of new planned communities that don't have the foot traffic of older neighborhoods. The Canary District in Toronto comes to mind as a place that is still settling in. That is how you know it's challenging.

Creating successful places from scratch requires the right strategy, careful design and programming, patience, and probably the ability to subsidize the right tenants to seed activity early on. It's also helpful if you can avoid going broke before the neighborhood comes alive.

Cover photo by Peter Robbins on

Resonance Consultancy – they do brands and strategies for places and products – has just released a new report called: World’s Best City Brands – A Global Ranking of Place Equity.

With all of these sorts of rankings, it really depends on the research methodology being used and the rigor in which it is being applied. In this case, they evaluated each city based on “six pillars of equity”:

1. Place: Perceived quality of a city’s natural and built environment
   

2. Product: A city’s key institutions, attraction and infrastructure
   

3. Programming: The arts, culture and entertainment in a city
   

4. People: Immigration and diversity of a city
   

5. Prosperity: Employment, GDP per capita entertainment in a city and corporate head offices
   

6. Promotion: Quantity of articles, references of a city and recommendations online
   

What’s perhaps unique about this study is that it combines measurable statistics with “visitor perception metrics” – data that they mined from social media. Here’s an excerpt from the methodology page:

“Our team became interested in the way visitors and citizens themselves influence the identity and perception of cities. Increasingly, they do it through their evaluation of experiences on social media and via the comments, images and reviews they share with family, friends and people around the world. These opinions and attitudes, much more than traditional marketing, influence the way people perceive places today.”

This is a fascinating shift for city brands and is something that we have discussed before on this blog. All of us are now involved in telling the story of the places in which we live and visit.

The entire report is well done and worth a read. It’s also a free download (you’ll need to enter your contact info). But below are the top 10 world’s best city brands. Not really any surprises for me. What about for you?