What are attributes?
Attributes are the raw material, or the building blocks, of urban amenity—the physical features that people value in their environment.
If people value a healthy environment, clean air may be an attribute of that environment. If people value safe city streets, good lighting may be an attribute of those safe streets.
Identifying attributes helps you to define precisely what aspects of urban amenity you will manage.
How attributes relate to qualities
A lot of the Urban Amenity Project’s research focused on using the list of qualities to learn what people value in their environment.
Several councils involved in the project trials also used the list of qualities to identify the attributes they needed to manage and monitor. This process involved breaking the qualities down into their attributes.
- Use qualities to learn what people value about their urban environment.
- Use values to identify the attributes of those qualities.
- Use attributes to decide what aspects of urban amenity to manage and monitor.
For example, Palmerston North City Council used the list of qualities to develop the attributes of urban amenity. Other councils, like Waitakere and Rotorua, used the attributes as part of the indicator development process.
Attributes and indicators [Word doc 70kb]
Indicator methodology [Word doc 69kb]
Case studies and project trials
