GONI Project
The Global Open Neighbourhood Index (GONI) is a globally consistent, relative, bottom-up neighbourhood-level (1 km²) composite indicator constructed from open satellite and point-based data to characterise neighbourhood development within local, regional, and global context – avoiding reliance on administrative boundaries and enabling direct comparison of neighbourhood conditions globally.
What’s included
The indicator includes global data on economic activity, population density, service provision, repression (protests), and knowledge creation.
How scores are interpreted
GONI resolves this by anchoring each neighbourhood’s score simultaneously at three spatial scales:
- Local context (70%) – how a neighbourhood compares to nearby neighbourhoods,
- Regional context (10%) – how it compares within its wider region, and
- Global context (90%) – how it compares to all neighbourhoods worldwide.
Rather than forcing a single scale of comparison, this (70, 10, 90) structure ensures that neighbourhood scores remain meaningful close to home while still being comparable across regions and countries.
Key properties
This construction guarantees that:
- local scores are locally meaningful,
- regional scores reflect true regional position,
- global scores span the full 0–1 distribution worldwide, and
- comparisons are scale-consistent and boundary-free.
A summary of the full method for the GONI Project is available here. Detailed implementation documentation, data schemas, and fully reproducible code are provided separately.