Tuesday, December 6, 2011
The Best and Worst Cities in the World
By Tom Kando
The annual 2011 Quality of Living Worldwide City Rankings by Mercer (London) has just come out.
The Mercer survey ranks 420 cities of the world. The report I saw lists 221 of them. These cities are ranked in terms of overall quality of life. This is based on several dozen factors, such as physical health, environmental pollution, standard of living, education, housing, crime, etc. Here are some of the results that were of greatest personal interest to me:A. Best city in the world: Vienna.
B. Worst city in the world: Baghdad, ranked #221.
C. 8 of the best 10 cities are in Europe, including: #1: Vienna, #2: Zurich, #4: Munich, #5: Dusseldorf, #7: Frankfurt; #8:Geneva, #9a: Bern and #9b: Copenhagen.
D. The other two in the top 10 are: #3: Auckland (New Zealand) and #6: Vancouver.
E. While I am talking about Europe, here are some other ones: #12: Amsterdam,
#17: Berlin, #26: Dublin, #30: Paris, #38 London (the highest ranking British city), #42: Milan, #52: Rome, #69: Prague, #73: Budapest (the two best East European cities), #199: Moscow - one of the lowest cities in the world, close to Dhaka, Bangladesh (#204) and Baghdad (#221).
F. The Americas: Dominated by Canada, including #5: Vancouver, #14: Ottawa,
#15: Toronto and #22: Montreal.
The US: Best cities: #29: Honolulu, #30: San Francisco, #36: Boston,
#43: Chicago, #47: New York City.
Latin Am.: No city in the top 50, and many near the bottom, such as #218: Port-au-Prince (Haiti).
G. Asia-Pacific: #3: Auckland (New Zealand), #11: Sidney, #25: Singapore
(the highest Asian city), #46: Tokyo, #70: Hong Kong.
H. Middle East and Africa: #74: Dubai and #78: Abu Dhabi are the 2 highest ranked cities of the Middle East, and #88:Cape Town is the highest city in Africa. #99: Tel Aviv. Eighteen of the bottom 25 cities of the world are in Africa.
Articles about the Mercer report give brief descriptions of these cities.
For example:
Vienna is described as “Austria’s cultural, economic, and political center with a population of about 1.7 million. It experiences 4 seasons in a year with a mild summer season and a rather windy and rainy winter season. It has an extensive transportation system and a very reliable health system. The country’s political stability also makes it a place worth living. Life expectancy in Vienna is 79.5 years.”
Vancouver is described as “...an amazing coastal city and a perfect place to live with a well developed and well established infrastructure, brilliant tourism spots, high educational standards and great health care system. The city has a population of 578,041 and an average life expectancy at birth of 81.16 years.”
Many of you will say right away that this stuff is very subjective. One person might put Amsterdam on top because of its red light district and cheap dope. Someone else remains forever attached to the city where he grew up - (in my case, Paris). And so forth.
But efforts such as the Mercer rankings deserve to be taken seriously. They are based on a great many objective criteria and pretty good methodology.
All in all, the report confirms what many of us already sort of thought, knew, or experienced. It is no surprise to see that an overwhelming majority of “bad” cities are in the Third World, first and foremost in Africa. Economics, obviously.
We also already knew that Eastern European cities are still struggling, even though they are progressing, hopefully.
That so many of the world’s highest quality-of-life cities are in Western Europe (Germany, Switzerland and Austria dominate) is probably irritating to many Americans and to other non-Europeans, and it could cause Europhiles such as myself to gloat. This is absolutely not my intent.
As to the Anglo-Saxon world, it is interesting that Canada, New Zealand and Australia appear to excel, but the US and the UK less so.
I hope that you find this interesting. Interpretations, anyone? leave comment here
5 comments:
I would assume that life in the worst cities or the cities of developing countries shouldn't be very costly but quite the opposite is true. Just have a glance at the list of the most and least expensive cities in Canada and US; you'll find out that New York and Toronto, the most expensive ones in Northern America, rank only 32nd and 59th respectively. On the contrary, the capitals of Angola, Chad and Russia are in the first five. Now who wouldn't come to live in Vancouver?
Katie,
I glanced at your link - it's the same outfit as the one I quote (Mercer).
You make good points.
But the relationship between quality of life and cost of living isn't clear to me. For one thing, INTERNALLY within a country (say, Canada), it seems like the high-quality cities are also often the expensive cities (E.g. Vancouver and Toronto).
So, while I am unable to make a generalization about the whole world, your comment does make me hypothesize that there is actually a POSITIVE correlation between quality of life and cost of living. In other words, within a given country at least, it may be that the “best” cities are the richest (= the most expensive) cities.
But internationally, I have no idea how this plays out. Two of the most expensive cities are Moscow and Geneva - one of the worst and one of the best. So you just go figure.
One would have to look into this in more detail.
I would suspect that there is a strong correlation between cultural values, education level, and economic productivity and these rankings. Lots of research potential for sociologists.
Gordon,
I agree.
But I am also thinking of something Katie and I touched upon:
Things are a bit different, depending on whether one looks at rankings (1) internally within a country, or (2) internationally:
If we lump together all of the world’s cities and rank them, as the Mercer people do, then the ranking is largely a ranking of the COUNTRIES/REGIONS in which the cities are imbedded.
It is hardly a surprise that most of the “bad” cities are in Africa and other very poor regions, and that most of the “good” cities are in rich Northern Europe and North America.
By the way (unrelated to Gordon’s comment):
In our previous comments, both Katie and I were suspecting that the best cities might often be much more expensive than the worst cities. As an afterthought, think for example of San Francisco - a great town, but boy, costly!
C'est drole que Vienne est la meilleure ville.
J'espere qu'il y a aussi moin d'antisemites que pendant Hitler!!
(translation: It's funny that Vienna is the best city. I hope that there are fewer antisemites than during Hitler)
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