Accenture Global Cities Forum: Toronto

[Dirk]

What do individuals expect of government—and how can government better address those expectations? The Accenture Institute for Public Service Value explores those and other questions with the Accenture Global Cities Forum, a series of daylong citizen panels in cities around the world. So far we have talked with individuals in Berlin, Dublin, London, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York, Oslo, Paris, Rome, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. We have captured the voices of those citizens—as well as our findings and analysis—in an interactive Flash site.

I stumbled upon this project on the consulting giant Accenture's website. A whole bunch of reports are available, including one for each city. They are essentially about how well the citizen like their city services, and what the priorities are for improving the services. Forums took place in London, Sydney, Singapore, Berlin, New York, Paris, Madrid and Los Angeles in 2007 and Oslo, Toronto, Tokyo, Rome and Dublin were added in 2008. The Toronto forum included 60 different Torontonians "from all walks of life". Apparently, compared to other cities, and in contraction with our supposed inferiority complex, we are second only to Sydney with 32% believing the city is a world class place to live and work. However, the constant complains of our traffic and general state of transportation are a widely held view with 78% of us saying that transport falls short of our expectations, second only to notoriously congested Rome. How accurately the findings of the reports represent the view of the general population is something to be debated.
Links:
The main website for the forum: http://www.accenture.com/Global/Rese...itiesForum.htm
The 2nd general report including 2008 cities: http://www.accenture.com/Global/Rese...erview2009.htm
The Toronto Report (PDF): http://nstore.accenture.com/Global_C...o%20040609.pdf

[lesouris]

Interestingly, one of the concerns brought up by Torontonians was rising levels of violent crime, especially those involving guns and knives. I was under the impression that violent crime has been on the decrease over the past 15-20 years in Canada in general and especially in Toronto. And yet you get a participant saying:

“The city is not as safe as it was 10 years ago and
we need to do something [about this], but we
don’t want to become a police state. We should
create programmes to encourage people to reject
a life of crime and enable them to get a job.”

Generally, I'd say there was very little in the report that came as a surprise. The lack of inferiority complex was a pleasant surprise, though.

It's interesinting how Sydney and Toronto scored in the top two spaces considering the amount they have in common - both being the largest and most multicultural cities in middle power Commonwealth countries.

[Nebakenezer]

Having lived in both Sydney and Toronto... I got to say Sydney, although very pretty, the most amazing climate, beaches and pretty girls, Is the most racist city I've ever been to (perhaps tied with Melbourne actually). Which makes Australia the most racist country I've ever been to in my life. Although in the end, I don't really blame them, they are so ignorant because they really havn't been exposed to much multiculural-ism unlike Toronto.

So my take is, although the climate is great, outdoor life is great, and the city of Sydney is much prettier to look at than Toronto. The excitement of living in the city cant be beat compared to Toronto. And our nightlife rocks compared to theirs. After 6 month in Sydney I got sick of the place and moved to Gold Coast.

That being said, Sydney "felt" a little bit worse than toronto when it came to crime, I don't know the stats to be sure.

[wonderboy416]

That's strange about Sydney. Because it's so much closer to Asia than North America for asians looking to learn English it's a much less-expensive option than flying out to North America... I've never heard a single person out of dozens or so people I've met who studied and learned English there ever say a negative word about the Australian people... Of course my sample size is small but I'll be curiously asking this questions to those that I know that have studied there.