How do you make a good city? One that’s liveable, simple to navigate and easy to love? These are questions that civic leaders must engage with as they try to satisfy the needs of their citizens and attract inward investment to head their way.

To ensure that their endeavours are not seen as profligate or whimsical, elected officials, planning teams and city architects find their clever plans being put through rigorous financial stress-testing and set against fun-free accounting KPIs – Key Performance Indicators.

All well and good but suddenly a notion that started out as an opportunity for creating a piece of civic delight ends up being judged on revenue per square metre or some inclusiveness barometer that few really understand. What’s more, the KPIs that get set for city makers are often too simplistic – or even just plain wrong.

So here are a few new targets for the KPI setters to consider, all inspired by some Monocle travels in recent months.

Plant fewer trees
You would struggle to find any city in the world that doesn’t have an ambitious and much-flaunted tree-planting programme. “We have planted a million trees in five years!” run the press releases. But who cares because it’s a useless KPI. Firstly, just because you plant a tree, doesn’t mean that it’s going to survive and flourish. At Monocle we are often invited to see impeccable residential projects or are taken around newly minted neighbourhoods designed by some of the best architects in the world, only to find ourselves distracted from their masterpieces by an army of nuclear-winter stick trees and dead-brown conifers. And is it OK to call something a tree when it’s about the size of a squirrel? Even when they do survive and are of a suitable scale, trees are put in places where they will never offer a shady canopy to pedestrians. They are just part of a box-ticking exercise. So plant fewer trees and instead select native flower species that can withstand heat and a scarcity of water. Garden with ambition but, honestly, a patch of wild grasses or a bed of resilient pollinating blooms might be your best bet.

Build fewer kilometres of cycle lanes
“We have created 100km of cycle lanes!” Well done you. But is that it? Is that the KPI target met? I’d like to know a few more details please. Who is using that new network? Is it the usual suspects or have you made routes that also appeal to kids heading to school and seniors who move at a gentle pace? And how many places to properly lock and secure a bike have you added? Or showers and changing rooms, and fountains to refill a water bottle? Is that cycle lane shaded in summer (see above)? Is it a boring straight line or have you added joy-inducing kinks and turns? It’s better to have 50km of loved lanes than 100km of underused cycle highway. Let interventions be catalysts for joy. Kill the kilometres-built KPI.

Stop counting the number of park benches
It can sound wonderful when a city trumpets the roll-out of a new street-furniture programme but just as with those cycle lanes, it’s where a new bench is placed that matters. I spotted one in London a few days ago that had been bolted into place under a flyover on a busy roundabout – hard to imagine anyone beyond a passing rat who would want to dwell on its surface.

Do less for people
City-hall folk can get carried away with their need to intervene, to shape the debate, to make sure that every idea has gone out to be workshopped in community consultations – given a KPI. But for centuries, many of the best interventions in our cities have happened in the gaps, when ordinary people and crazy-as-hell philanthropists have managed to break the rules and take the reins. Modern KPI-governed civic leadership has its moments but sometimes it’s the rule-breakers who need to be allowed to rule.

Let ‘joy’ have control
And “dignity” and “serendipity” and “loveability”. These words, these emotions, are as valid as any KPI. Don’t discount them – they are the essence of what makes a place good. Let “KPI” come to stand for Key Playfulness Indicators and then we can start building better cities.

To read all of Andrew’s past columns, click here.