I am not a big one for city lists -- you know, the perennial feature of magazines (and many newspapers) in which journalists come up with some complicated way of comparing cities.
Fast Company has one up right now on "Fast Cities," which was recently referenced on PhillyBlog, which is what brought this up. Philly is mentioned as a "City on the Verge" for being an "Urban Innovator." Whoop-de-doo. (But go vote for Philly.)
In checking out that story, I came across a set of rankings that I could actually get into: CityVitals, a 2006 report done by consultant Joseph Cortright for CEOs for Cities, which measures cities' performance on a different set of measures: talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness.
It's all very creative economy, but what I liked was that it also used some common-sense economic measures, such as the amount of available venture captial and number of small businesses.
How does Philly do? Among the 50 top US cities, we often rank in the middle: High teens or 20s or so. We rank best in transit use -- yay -- and voting -- DOUBLE yay!
We do worst in ... wireless internet access! Though this predates any rollout of Wireless Philadelphia, which is slowly spreading across the city.
We do second worst in something called the "weirdness index." Now, I really like that this set of rankings has a "weirdness index," but it's obviously deeply flawed if it really ranks Philadelphia as more normal than Oklahoma City, Charlotte and Hartford, Conn. Apparently, this measure is of consumption patterns, and where they differ from national norms.
Maybe our consumption patterns don't "differ," but we all know that Philadelphia is a deeply weird place.