Abstract
City competitiveness relies on several factors including urban amenities. This project attempts to predict how changes in the number of amenities affect the competitiveness of a city. Predicting city competitiveness can benefit local government units and investors in gauging how a city might respond to development in the urban landscape. Data on the recent cities’ competitiveness index were obtained from the National Competitiveness Council website. The list of urban amenities, scraped from OpenStreetMap, was utilized as an input to the prediction model.
The Gradient Boosting Method was employed to predict a city’s competitiveness with a margin of error of ±5.8 (over a 100). Scenarios were examined to assess the method. Results suggest that adding private amenities have varying effect. Seemingly, amenities that appear saturated in a city have less, or even negative, impact to the city’s competitiveness. Future studies are directed to consider other amenities-related features or factors such as socio-demographic data of the locale.
