The notion of valuing cities is an interesting and useful one.<p>The notion of doing this by way of real estate valuation is somewhere between misguided and actvely dangerous.<p>Asset price inflation is not, should not be confused with, and proxies poorly for, real economic wealth increase.<p>The definition of wealth itself has been and remains something of a conundrum within economics. It wasn't until I actually started reading Adam Smith closely some years back that I realised his definition, "the annual produce and labour of the nation", is a <i>flow</i> rather than a <i>stock</i> measure. (Smith biographer and editor Edwin Cannan commented similarly in the late 19th century, I'm late to the party).<p>As such, Smith's metric bears a strong resemblence to Leslie White's law, "culture evolves as the amount of energy harnessed per capita per year is increased, or as the efficiency of the instrumental means of putting the energy to work is increased".<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White's_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White's_law</a><p>Which might make for a more useful metric basis than City Observatory are proposing.