That's the question the Knight Foundation aspired to answer with a three-year, 26-city survey designed to better understand the factors that emotionally attach people to where they live.
Researchers consistently detected three metrics - a city's openness, aesthetics and social experience - that seem to drive the extent to which people care about their place.
I'm not convinced that's a groundbreaking discovery. But the info maps created to measure and track a city's performance on key indicators is interesting to play with. Here are the links to that data for the greater Great Lakes cities studied.
Akron
Detroit
Duluth
Fort Wayne
Gary
St. Paul
State College
Also, video reports for some:
