What’s your town’s RQ?

Having just become the first person in the world to complete the Renewal Quotient Quiz I feel duty bound to urge everyone else to have a go.

It’s an online questionnaire designed to calculate your town or city’s capacity for renewal, or RQ (renewal quotient). It’s all pretty painless. Is there a coherent overriding strategy guiding the future of your town? Do the powers that be prefer to recycle and reuse what they’ve got or are they just itching to get the bulldozers in or find another scrap of green space to concrete over? That sort of thing.

When I did it, Sheffield came out with a score of 225 out of 1,000. Hardly the marks of a city destined for membership of Mensa, or whatever the RQ equivalent would be. Given Mensa is Latin for something or other, how about Resurrectio?

Actually, 225 is an average score according to the quiz (although I’m not sure how they work that out given I’m the first to complete it).  But being average is even less inspiring than it sounds. The advice after the score said ‘most communities are not revitalizing at any given time, so an “average” chance means “not likely”‘.

Set up by the Resolution Fund in Washington DC, the quiz is described as a tool for citizens. But certified scores (not sure what that means) will also be used to create a list of the best places to invest, so if that’s not enough of an incentive to have a go I’m not sure what is. Be honest with your answers though…

Go to http://tinyurl.com/cra4na