U of T's Patricia McCarney launches Open City Data Portal

Hundreds of cities will now be able to compare themselves against other leading cities with the release of standardized data looking at everything from youth unemployment to energy consumption. It's all thanks to the World Council on City Data, a project with major international implications by University of Toronto Professor Patricia McCarney . McCarney, director of U of T's Global Cities Institute , compiled the data after developing an international standard for cities to collect and report data on 100 different indicators. That data until now was only available to the 20 cities that had participated in the project. On Friday, at a National League of Cities event in California, McCarney unveiled an open data portal created by the World Council on City Data to urban leaders. The open data portal will now allow anyone from mayor and city planners to researchers, high school students and community groups to access the data and begin comparing cities and posing deeper questions like why some cities have a higher life expectancy. It's the world's first open, online platform for globally standardized data on cities that's been independently verified and is comparable, McCarney said.