In our online Best Neighbourhood survey, respondents told us a great neighbourhood is one with a high Walk Score,* lots of park spaces, with strong community engagement and good access to supermarkets. We collected data from the City of Edmonton and the Edmonton Police Service for every neighbourhood on each of these points and then, using the weighting of the most important characteristics, crunched the numbers to calculate the results.
*Walk Score measures the walkability of a neighbourhood based on the percentage of daily errands that can be accomplished on foot in the area. Walk Score is a private company based in Seattle, and it provides a complete list of Walk Scores, Transit Scores and Bike Scores for Edmonton neighbourhoods on its website.
MOST IMPORTANT NEIGHBOURHOOD CHARACTERISTICS (OUT OF 16 CHOICES)
1. High Walk Score, weight 5,794
2. High number of parks, weight 5,748
3. Strong community engagement, weight 5,313
4. Good access to supermarkets, weight 4,965
5. High transit score, weight 3,800
6. High number of restaurants, pubs and coffee shops, weight 3,661
7. Low crime, weight 3,288
8. High number of community schools, weight 2,912
Finishing at the bottom were the “reputation of a neighbourhood” and the “amount of renovations being done by homeowners.”
CALCULATING ENGAGEMENT
Community engagement means a lot of different things to different people and a lot of what it means is subjective. Yet our aim was to create an engagement score based on objective measures available comprehensively for the city’s many neighbourhoods.
One aspect of community engagement that can be measured is neighbours’ opportunities to run into each other. The more neighbours see each other out and about in their community, the more likely it is that they meet and then become involved.
To create our engagement score we collected data on access to libraries, parks, playgrounds, community halls, schools and more.
Our engagement score is definitely a proxy for other measures of community involvement such as friendly neighbours who are actively involved in helping each other. But we think it’s a pretty good proxy.