Last week, the BBC published an article on the world’s ‘top 50 cities’ to live in (London only UK entry in world’s ‘top 50 cities’). Based on the Mercer Quality of Living ranking, the article cited London’s lowly 39th position on the rankings table. Fortunately for me and my troop, it also cited Sydney as sitting pretty in 10th place, with Vancouver riding high at 4th. T
his week, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on the release of a PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ report highlighting Sydney’s superior natural and living environments, and air quality, which put it above and beyond most other comparable cities (Sydney, the good news… and bad).
Vindication for our major upheavals to what is consistently acknowledged as two of the world’s top 10 ranked cities in the world? Or a sad indicator that London (and the UK writ large – no other UK city made the top 50) just isn’t ‘cutting the mustard’ as a decent place to call home?
I always enjoy reading these rankings and take a perverse pleasure in citing them to friends and family but I’m not convinced they paint a fair picture of a place.
Poor old London doesn’t make the top 10 but is surely one of the world’s ‘great’ cities, bursting at the seams with history and culture, unrivalled arts, fashion and music scenes, and a trend-setting vibe that gave Cool Britannia its good name. The top 2 cities, Vienna and Zurich, are indeed beautiful cities, combining magnificent European architecture with wonderfully planned city spaces, but would I really want to pick up my things and move to dreary Dusseldorf in Germany (#6) or boring Bern in Switzerland (#9)? Probably not.
I guess I’m missing the point here. The cities are based solely on liveability factors and these factors are the kinds of things that we value in a city. Factors like low crime rates, political stability, good hospitals, clean air, and a decent climate. The problem is that the ‘great’ cities like London lose out in a number of these key areas and when taken, for example, with the industrial cityscape of Birmingham or the relatively volatile Glaswegian environment, the UK simply doesn’t stack up in terms of safe, beautiful, liveable places to call home.
When we set off from the UK in 2003, we were consciously searching for the ‘wow’ factor and subconsciously searching for those things that make a city great to live in. Whilst I still don’t believe that the rankings fairly represent the great cities of the world that we love to visit and spend time in, it does prove that liveability matters, and cities like Vancouver and Sydney are among the most liveable in the world.
If I understand correctly, though, those rankings are designed to help companies figure out the compensation packages for executives who are being moved around the world. The things that are attractive to those people (namely, stability) aren’t necessarily the same things that make a great city for those who live there – otherwise we’d all live in perfectly manicured sub-divisions.
It would be interesting to do a ranking of great cities that somehow included those aspects that make you love a place, despite (or because of) the meat-eating squirrels, stuffy and unreliable tube systems and industrial city scapes… What makes a city “liveable”, and is that what we aspire to?
They absolutely are designed to help companies move people overseas and therefore that does skew the rankings somewhat. However, I still always find they make for interesting reading. If you could rank cities on those aspects that you consider important, which places would feature in your Top 5?