From city names to spatial objects: auditing public spatial verifiability across selected global urban data infrastructures

In cross-system urban studies, records are often linked through city names, although the same name may denote an administrative jurisdiction, morphological settlement, functional urban area, or programme-specific reporting territory. We examined whether city-labelled records in selected global ranking and monitoring infrastructures provided sufficient public evidence to identify represented spatial objects and verify their relation to a common external reference. Using 1,114 Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) Urban Centres, we reconstructed publicly documented positions in the IMD Smart City Index, Global Power City Index, and UN-Habitat Urban Monitoring Framework. We audited 552 positions across five stages: name matching, object evidence, boundary evidence, geometry evidence, and a reproducible GHSL relation. Of these, 547 were strict named-city or documented-alias correspondences and five were broader or composite reporting objects. Only five positions provided object evidence and five provided boundary evidence; none provided sufficient public evidence for independently recoverable geometry or a reproducible GHSL relation. Ranking and monitoring overlapped for 103 cities, compared with a structurally adjusted expectation of 95.8; alternative uncertainty intervals for the observed-to-expected ratio included one. These results identify a gap between name-level linkage and public spatial verifiability without establishing technical, semantic, or operational non-interoperability or actual territorial incompatibility.