Once you've found your way around, the Cities Engine rewards a closer look. Beneath the map is a structured set of dashboards, comparisons and directories designed to answer real questions about a place. Here's the guided tour.
Eight themes, three ways to look
Every city's story is organised into eight themes: Environment, Governance, Economy, Demographics, Urban Form, Risks, Waste and Organizations. For each theme you can switch between three complementary views:
- Dashboard — the numbers and charts for that theme, for the city you're focused on.
- Map — the same theme painted across the whole world, so you can see where a city sits in the global pattern.
- Compare — two or more cities placed side by side on that theme, so differences jump out.
This structure means you're never hunting through a single giant page. Want to understand a city's environmental profile? Open the Environment dashboard. Curious how that compares regionally? Flip to the map. Weighing two candidates? Use Compare.
Comparing governance of Washington DC with Rio de Janeiro.
Leaderboards and ranking
Sometimes the question isn't “tell me about this city” but “who's best (or worst) at this?” The leaderboard ranks cities across the entire dataset on a chosen measure — growth, greenness, risk, recycling and more — and turns the result into a clickable list, so you can jump straight from a ranking into any city's profile.
City profiles and detailed reports
Each city has a home view that gathers the essentials — population, economy, environmental indicators, and a risk read-out — into one snapshot. When you need the full picture, a detailed report pulls the deeper metrics together in one place, ready to read or share. Population figures come with their own evidence panel, so you can see where an estimate comes from rather than taking it on faith.
Archetypes: finding a city's true peers
The Archetypes view groups cities by what they can afford to do and what shape they are, rather than by geography. It's the fastest way to find genuinely comparable peers — cities that share your city's structure and challenges — so that a lesson learned in one place is more likely to transfer. (For the method behind the 24 archetypes, see how we built the Cities Engine.)
Organisations and voices
The platform isn't only about metrics — it's about the people and groups doing the work. The Organizations directory maps civil-society groups (NGOs, community-based organisations, charities and social enterprises) to the cities they serve, while Voices profiles the individuals and experts behind them. Each has a public profile you can link to and share.
Finding the right organisation is easier because search understands meaning, not just keywords: describe the kind of work you're looking for and the platform surfaces the closest matches, falling back to ordinary text search when you need an exact name.
Managing your own listing
Organisations and voices can look after their own presence through a self-service portal — updating locations, media, news, and the programmes they run (including recurring events). A short guided tour helps new members get oriented, and proposed changes flow through a review step to keep the directory trustworthy.
That covers the everyday toolkit. If you want to push further — turning João into a genuine research partner and seeing how the directory keeps itself fresh — read power tools in the Cities Engine.