City Center Index - A national standard for downtown development!

City Center Index - A national standard for downtown development!Swedish city centers are the heart and lungs of cities and neighborhoods. It is in the city centers that trade, culture and work flourish.

It is the city centers that run and manage arenas that require an increased degree of sustainability, equality and diversity.

In spite of this, today we have no or poor order on how to behave as a city center actor in the best way in order to get your business to develop in the best way.

One of the aspects that is missing today is relevant and continuously updated data sets that can give property owners, municipalities and other stakeholders a good basis for how to drive sustainable, equal and diversity-oriented urban development.Svenska Stadskärnor was founded in 1993 with the aim of protecting the city center and meeting the development of the ever-increasing foreign trade.

Over the years, the business has developed to inspire, educate, support and spread knowledge to its members and stakeholders.

The vision is to be the whole of Sweden´s collaboration platform to create attractive and sustainable city centres.One of the current biggest challenges for the 100 members of Swedish City Centers in terms of data-based city center development is that a common and coherent structure and order is needed to be able to nationally measure and coordinate data sets that are to be the basis for analysis and understanding.

Namely, in today´s Sweden, unlike in some other countries in, for example, Europe, there are no analysis platforms and datasets that move on such a zoomed-in level as city centers constitute.

What is simply needed is a City Core Index that is based on relevant research and that is published and provided in a way that creates a good opportunity for understanding and analysis today and that can lay the foundation for future predictability and, by extension, foresee the future.

In the long term, the work has the potential to increase the capacity among actors who develop and manage places in Sweden to continuously and flexibly understand, plan and compare the sustainability of places.By developing an index, Swedish city centers can establish a norm and a standard for how we can create comparability and build knowledge for all Swedish city centers and district centers.

In the main mission of Swedish city centers is to educate, develop and create conditions for its members and their opportunities to carry out their tasks in the best way; to develop Swedish city centres, and to do this in a sustainable way.Developing, establishing and providing an index requires a research-based process, therefore the collaboration with RISE in the creation of the index becomes a collaboration that ensures that the new city center index.

The work rests on a secure scientific basis with the ambition to create universal measurement scales in relevant areas such as security.

Researchers in measurement and location cooperation participate in the development of the index so that policies, analysis instruments and knowledge base can have an impact on decision-making.The third component of the project is that the index intends to be published via Pattern Geographical Insight´s innovative web platform.

The platform is developed in parallel with the project and part of the project aims to ensure that the index can be optimized for the commercial platform as well as to ensure that the index can be established in many different target environments but with Pattern as a yardstick for how the index development should be carried out in the best way in order to be able to as a basis for data handlers who can interpret, compile, visualize and analyze the data.The goal of the project is thus to create, establish and provide a new index for the development of Swedish city centres.

An index developed by Svenska Stadskärnor, Rise and Pattern Geographical Insights where Svenska Stadskärnor´s over 100 members ensure that knowledge and dissemination take place, wher