The management of a city must be measurable. Citizens have various ways of assessing whether the promises of electoral programs have been achieved or not, and we are also guided by our experience in using the city, by the communication made by government teams about different achievements, by news and the treatment given by the media, but, above all, by social networks.
Generating public opinion about the development of a city depends on many factors, but there is nothing like objective and measurable data, that is, indicators or KPIs (key performance indicator).
Once the vision, mission, and objectives to be achieved have been defined, a Government team should equip itself with KPIs to measure whether the set objectives are being developed correctly. A good city strategy is one that allows explaining to citizens that for each objective set ---these could be the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved by the UN, for example--- the City Council will develop specific programs and actions. Once this exercise is done, measurable indicators must be set to know if the program and action are producing the desired impact and to know the results.
If we look at the 5th SDG, for example, Gender Equality, related to the 4th objective, Quality Education, and the city aims to increase STEM vocations among girls from primary school, for example, it should first explain how it will do it and what results it wants to obtain. The proposal can be started with a pilot plan, but indicators must undoubtedly be set. The number of schools involved in the project, the number of students who will participate, what methodology will be used, and what budget can be measured. But, in addition, there should be a monitoring mechanism and support for schools to measure how many of these students who participated in the program in primary education have chosen a technological or scientific path in secondary and high school.
Allow me another example focused on the 11th SDG objective, Sustainable Cities and Communities. If we propose to ourselves and to the citizens the action of reducing water consumption in the city, since water is a scarce essential good, we should quantify, first of all, the water we consume in public buildings, when watering parks, when cleaning streets, in vehicle cleaning, in sports facilities, etc. In my opinion, these data, which are surely registered by the City Councils as annual gross consumption data and which surely appear in the municipal budget, already allow us to monitor the behavior of the water management carried out by the City Council. If there is an anomaly in the consumption series, it is worth asking if there was a breakdown, which could be, or if any program or policy was modified.
Once the consumption data series is known, we could set new consumption reduction objectives or correct programs that involve too much water expenditure, or invest in sensors to measure the humidity of parks and reduce the frequency of irrigation and, evidently, cross climatology data with smart irrigation so that the unpleasant situation of seeing automatic irrigation systems working on a rainy day does not happen.
In short, KPIs help governments and citizens to have objective information on the proper development of city management and to know whether it is progressing adequately or not.