ABSTRACT
The use of social measures to improve our understanding of the main features of society, how they inter-relate, and how these features and their relationships change was started way back in the 1930s and 1940s by William Ogburn at the University of Chicago (Land 1975; Sheldon and Moore 1968). This produced what Land (2000) called descriptive social indicators of the state of society. The need to have such contextual indicators to profile characteristics of different places is increasingly important in the process of formulating urban and regional development policies. Following in the footsteps of the social indicators movement, supranational organisations across the world have shown their interest in assessing the state of urban development across different nations. The World Bank (2003) compiles the annual world development indicators series to monitor the achievement towards international development goals. Eurostat has redeveloped ‘Urban Audits’ to improve the European Commission's knowledge of quality of life in urban areas across Europe (European Commission 2000b). A similar venture can be found on the other side of the globe. The Asian Development Bank recently has made concerted effort to compile the Cities Data Book to inform the management of the urban sector in Asia (Westfall and de Villa 2001). In England, the government is committed to monitor the urban renaissance visions set out in the Urban White Paper (DETR 2000d) by developing a Town and City Indicators Database (see Wong et al.2004) and publishing the State of the Cities Reports (e.g. Robson et al. 2000).
