When Athens built the Agora, it was more than just creating a marketplace. It was making a declaration: that the quality of public encounter – between citizens, between strangers, between a person and their city – was a matter of state. Twenty-five centuries later, Dubai has made the same declaration. And this time, it comes with a measurement framework.
There is a question that the great cities of the world have always avoided asking aloud, because to ask it is to accept accountability for the answer: “How does living here actually feel?” Not the gross domestic product. Not the tourism arrivals. Not the infrastructure indices that populate the glossy pages of global liveability reports produced by consultancies that have never queued for a taxi in the rain. The felt quality of daily life – the texture, the tone, the ambient experience of being a human being in a shared space – has remained, by tacit agreement among city administrators worldwide, safely unmeasured.
Dubai has just ended that agreement.
Late last year, the Dubai Civility Committee, which is tasked with supporting the emirate’s efforts to “enhance its aesthetic ambience”, unveiled a five-indicator framework. On the surface, it is a governance document. But read more carefully, it is a philosophical provocation.
By formally committing to measure civility visual, public cleanliness, discipline and order, public behaviour and public calmness – and by treating these as trackable civic outputs and not just aspirations – Dubai has done something that no G20 city, for all its institutional sophistication, has managed. It has made the “experience” of a city a matter of official record.
The committee’s framework states that while “most cities build and hope civility follows, Dubai is designing for it”.
Consider what this means in practice. Vienna perennially tops global liveability rankings – and rightly so. But Vienna does not formally track whether strangers treat each other with dignity on its trams. Singapore enforces public order with renowned precision, but its metrics are penal, not experiential. Copenhagen scores brilliantly on happiness indices, yet those indices are self-reported surveys, not governance commitments. Dubai is doing something categorically different: declaring that the “feel” of the city is the government’s business, building a measurement apparatus around it and publishing the framework for the world to scrutinise.
It’s important to understand what each of the five indicators is getting at.
“Civility visual” entails creating visual harmony between buildings, streets, signage and space. A civilised city refuses to build without beauty. “Public cleanliness” is about how a city maintains itself. Streets, facilities, public spaces. A civilised city never lets the standard drop.
“Discipline and order” is about having consistency of systems, policies and shared rules. It’s important to understand that order isn’t control; it’s the agreement that shared spaces deserve shared rules. “Public behaviour” focuses on how a city’s people treat one another. Respect, co-operation, everyday decency between strangers across 200 nationalities.
And finally, there is “public calmness”, which relates to how a city sounds and feels. The noise it tolerates. The serenity it protects. A civilised city guards your right to think.
The fifth indicator deserves particular attention, because it is the one that will most confound urban policy orthodoxy. The framework defines it as how a city sounds and feels – the noise it tolerates and the serenity it protects – concluding that a civilised city guards your right to think.
No city-planning authority in the western world has ever formally submitted a quarterly report on whether citizens retained the right to be mentally undisturbed in a shared public space. Dubai has reclassified cognitive serenity as a civic deliverable. That is not a small thing.
The fourth indicator – public behaviour – is, if anything, more radical still. It tracks how a city’s people treat each other: the respect between strangers, the co-operation and everyday decency that no law can fully mandate and no camera can adequately capture.
The framework is candid about what it is attempting: this is the metric, it states plainly, that no other city even tries to track. In a city of more than 200 nationalities, this is described as a prerequisite and not just as a cultural bonus. That word – prerequisite – signals a governance maturity that most cities, homogeneous and confident in their social cohesion, have never been forced to develop. Dubai has been forced to develop it. And in being forced to do so, it has become the world’s most sophisticated laboratory for the civic management of human difference.
The deeper strategic significance of this framework lies not in its five indicators but in the act of publishing them. Global cities compete on rankings they did not design, and using criteria they did not set, to serve audiences they cannot fully reach.
The Economist Intelligence Unit defines liveability. Mercer defines quality of life. The IMD defines competitiveness. Dubai has, with this framework, made a decisive move towards what communications strategists call “narrative sovereignty” – the power to define your own terms of excellence and invite the world to be measured against yours, rather than perpetually measuring yourself against theirs.
This is not branding. Branding is what you say about yourself. This is something harder and more durable: it is what you commit to measuring, transparently, over time. Accountability is the only currency that survives a crisis of credibility, and Dubai has just deposited a significant sum.
The framework’s opening statement lands with the quiet authority of something that did not need to shout to be heard: “A city’s civilisation is measured not only by its buildings and economy, but by how it makes people live.” This is, in essence, a rebuke – gentle but unmistakable – to a century of urban development philosophy that has treated the human experience of a city as a downstream consequence of its physical and economic infrastructure. Build the roads, the towers, the metro lines, the free zones, and civilisation will arrange itself accordingly. Dubai is arguing the opposite. Civilisation is the infrastructure. Everything else is construction.
For those of us who have spent years advising on strategic communications in this region, the timing of this framework is as significant as its content. The world is in the middle of a global renegotiation of what cities are for.
Post-pandemic urban flight, the rise of remote work, the competition between cities for mobile talent and mobile capital – all of these have shifted the question from “Where can I work?” to “Where do I actually want to be?” Dubai’s answer, implicit in the civility indicators, is precise: here, where your experience is not an accident but a design intention.
The closing logic of the framework is its most powerful line, and it deserves to echo beyond this city’s borders: most cities build and hope civility follows. Dubai is designing for it. In that single distinction lies a governance philosophy worth exporting – and a standard worth aspiring to, for any city that takes seriously the question of what it owes the people who chose it.
The cities that will define this century are not those with the tallest skylines or the largest airports. They are the ones bold enough to ask how they make their people feel – and honest enough to write the answer down.
