similar.city - matching cities by culture, economy and climate (how much, living)

[johnel]

I have just expanded my city analog site similar.city to cover cultural and economic characteristics (previously, it only supported weather matching).

The site is an interactive map for matching cities using a color-scale visualization. It has over 1,000 cities matched on culture, economy and weather. This means that it has more than 1.5 million city-to-city matches in its data set.



GDP per capita, economic size, levels of corruption and types of industry affect economic matches. The GaWC study of global cities also impacts the economic match results.

For cultural matching, the key metrics are Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, Mercer Quality of Living Survey, demographic data, climate, the size of the population and characteristics of the cityscape affect cultural matches.

For weather, long term climate data is primarily used here. In particular summer and winter temperature averages and rainfall patterns and totals. Continentality metrics and elevation are also used.

You can also adjust how much of economy, culture and weather you want to match on. For example, if you want to only match on weather, you can reduce the economy and culture sliders to zero.

The update to the site is new, and I have changed the layout, so I'm expecting teething problems. The site is expected to work on Chrome, Firefox and Opera, and I'm sure works on the new MS browsers. It seems OK on IE10, but any older than that and it probably won't work.

Let me know what you think.

http://similar.city

[johnel]

Here's an example of the output, using matches for Brisbane, Australia

Using the default even 1/3 split between economy, culture and weather, the top 3 global matches (outside Asia-Pacific) for Brisbane are:

Houston 85
Charlotte 84
Dallas 83

Matching 100% on weather:

Durban 92
Pietermaritzburg 92
Córdoba, Argentina 91

Matching 100% on economy:

Edmonton 85
Vancouver 85
Calgary 84

Matching 100% on culture:

Boston 94
Philadelphia 94
Washington, D.C. 94

[TitanRam]

I'm checking it out; seems like an awesome tool!

[grega94]

I found one inaccuracy, Rostov-na-danu is one of the largest cities in Russia, not a town of 100,000 you probably forgot to add a zero or something but it's definitely 1 million plus.

[johnel]

@TitanRam - thanks!

@grega94 - thanks, I'll update that for the next data revision.

[Ariete]

Cool!

Seems that you have more cities from Norway and Sweden than Finland. Could you add Turku, the 3rd largest urban area in Finland?

Pop: 300,000
GDP per capita: very high
Mean daytime: 9C
Max daytime: 22C
Min daytime: -2C
rainfall: 720 mm

[johnel]

@Ariete - adding a city needs the collection of a lot more data than the ones you provided.



Every city on the site has values for the above input variables. I'll add Turku to my list of potential data changes for the next revision.