Urban Development Index (UDI): A Comparison between the City of Rio de Janeiro and Four Other Global Cities

One of the methods to assess the urban development of a city is to allocate indicators that quantify its efficiency in performing various functions, such as urban mobility, security, sustainability, and economy, among others. The motivation of this work is the fact that the city of Rio de Janeiro, although widely known and admired around the world for its natural beauty, has a wide negative notoriety regarding its urban functionality. There is a critical need for investment in the city’s infrastructure in order to improve the quality of life of its population. The novelty of this work is in proposing an index that quantifies the urban functionality of the city of Rio de Janeiro and that represents urban development. The research focuses on optimizing investments in infrastructure and hence increasing the urban performance offered by the city of Rio de Janeiro. In the proposed methodology for modeling the Urban Development Index (UDI), this work presents the model structure made from a knowledge-based urban development assessment model (KBUD/AM), the determination of the indicators, the selection of the cities, the data collection from primary and secondary sources and the use of statistical techniques for data normalization and scaling. The research aims to quantify, compare and evaluate the level of urban development of Rio de Janeiro, performing benchmarking with other four global cities (Stockholm, Shanghai, Boston, and Cape Town). Cities are ranked for their UDI to make the comparison more straightforward. Based on the results, Rio de Janeiro ranks second to last among the five cities studied, with an UDI of 0.395, only slightly better than Cape Town. The results confirm that the city of Rio de Janeiro has several deficiencies, especially in the education, safety and health sectors, and is very far from most of the other developed cities. The city of Rio de Janeiro should promote investments in research and development. Finally, this work confirms that Rio de Janeiro must tackle security problems as a matter of priority.