To top that, in the first week after I arrived in Melbourne, I was sitting in an academic conference on urban sustainability when a professor told the audience: “Let me tell you about this whole liveable Melbourne thing. Indeed, I must confess that a few months ago when I told my friends that I was leaving Tokyo to move to Melbourne I did rather smugly drop the following line into conversations on a number of occasions: “It is the world’s most liveable city, you know!” But imagine my shock when Monocle magazine recently announced that Tokyo was number one in their 2015 Quality of Life survey. I particularly like the public tram system, which is the largest in the world. It is certainly a city with a lot going for it. Having just moved to this fair metropolis, I can check out the “liveability” first-hand. One such town is Melbourne, which has been ranked the world’s most liveable city by the Economist since 2011. Perhaps lamenting the absence of New York in the Liveability Ranking, the New York Times took a humorous swing at the EIU stating that the “Economist clearly equates liveability with speaking English” and that the ranking was full of “old British Empire towns”. Some view the whole ranking idea as being more about entertainment and increasing magazine sales. The honest truth is that if you see a newspaper headline along the lines of “Vienna is the world’s most liveable city!” then it is best not to take it at face value but rather with a pinch of salt, a healthy dose of scepticism. But what is going on here: New York or London don’t rate? How can a city be global economically powerful without being especially liveable? Seeing the funny side Taking the rankings at face value, Vienna would clearly be the winner as it is the only city that appears in all three rankings. Before examining what is actually behind these rankings, let’s look at the top five cities in each. ![]() For what I can tell, these are the only rankings looking at how liveable our cities are. The three rankings I look at here are the Liveability Ranking by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), Mercer’s Quality of Living Ranking and Monocle Magazine’s Quality of Life Survey. As a social scientist, I am much more interested in what it is like to live in a city and how urban life compares in different parts of the world. However, the three rankings I want to discuss in this article focus more on liveability of a city than on economic power and global influence. In addition, Forbes magazine publishes an annual list of the world’s most influential cities that in 2014 was topped yet again by London, New York, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo. Those same cities appear in other rankings such as the Global Power City Index, the Global Economic Power Index and the Global City Competitive Index. The top five global cities in 2014 were New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong. Perhaps you live in a global city? According to the American Journal of Foreign Policy, global cities are the most interconnected cities, serving as hubs for global integration and helping to set international agendas. ![]() Do you live in the most liveable city in the world?īut what does that really mean? We love ranking cities and attaching fancy titles to them.
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