The most livable cities

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As I wrote last year, these liveability index ignores all the best cities in Europe and I suppose in most countries by focusing on the largest cities.<p>I enjoyed living in the US, France, Denmark and Germany, I can&#x27;t find Boulder, Besançon, Nantes, Helsingor, Münster, etc. These are all smaller cities outside of the big ones and they would all have a score higher than Vienna in this index.<p>I am 100% confident that you can find in your country a lot of incredibly nice cities to live in.<p>This article should be titled &quot;The most livable big cities&quot;.

This list is a complete joke, evidenced by the fact that they use a definition of livibility that puts cities that are barely walkable in the top 10.

<i>&gt; Other cities affected by the contagion of war, such as Budapest and Warsaw, saw their stability scores slip as geopolitical tensions increased.</i><p>Meanwhile, kids in American schools are getting shot at, but yeah, Warsaw is definitely less livable than any large US city.

Some factors rapidly changing in UK cities are<p>- Empty offices since the pandemic<p>- Disappearance of the high-street due to Amazon<p>- New &quot;In-between&quot; builds<p>Most British cities still have empty or skeleton-crewed office buildings. That can&#x27;t be sustainable. Surely these will be sold off as housing.<p>Shops are vanishing at a terrifying rate. Some city centres are boarded up and only charity shops, Tesco minimarts and tattoo&#x2F;nail bars remain.<p>Every tiny plot of land is being sold off to developers to &quot;fill in&quot; with profitable (but in my reckoning totally unneeded) housing. This is changing public footpaths and cycle cut-throughs and squeezing the density of some areas.<p>I think any metric of &quot;livability&quot; would be in flux and likely to change in many British cities.

Affordability doesn&#x27;t seem to count in this list. On average housing expenses (rent or mortgage) are around 60% of income in Vancouver metro.<p>I won&#x27;t even get into weather: the first few days of blue skies just started this week after a year of bleak gray-on-blue. Depressing is an understatement.

what is living well? Why are these lists always so skewed toward such a normative view of liveability?<p>Zürich is a beautiful and well-organized city, for example, but every single time I&#x27;ve been there I&#x27;ve found out that its quiet translates into a boringness I&#x27;ve seldom experienced anywhere else. For me, a man in his late thirties who has no plans to have kids and form a normative family, it&#x27;s a living nightmare.

Ranking Frankfurt higher than Munich is a joke. I lived in both cities (currently living near Frankfurt) and it&#x27;s not even close. Infrastructure, cultural and recreational activities, architecture. None of these things are even in the same ballpark.

I am sorry this article is terrible - it&#x27;s at best a reflection of views of the Economists journalists idea of what the y consider &#x27;liveability&#x27; - which they don&#x27;t feel like sharing with us anyway.<p>At worst, this is an infomercial for the data components they gathered, which they use to come up with these aggregate stats.

They think Istanbul is in Western Europe while Budapest is in Eastern Europe, I&#x27;m not entirely convinced that rest of their report is worth reading.

With its colourful graphs and precise numbers, this all sounds very scientific. In reality, I&#x27;m guessing a group of people listed where they think is lovely to live and that&#x27;s what we&#x27;re now discussing.

The fact that there isn&#x27;t a single dutch city in the top 10, but 3 in car-infested Canada tells me that I have very different standards for &quot;livable&quot;.

So Australian, Canadian and some European cities are the places to be. Not overly surprising (at least to me). They&#x27;re the only 3 regions I&#x27;d choose to live and work due to the balanced lifestyle that the Economist rates in its study.

I&#x27;m glad Tashkent is finally in Eastern Europe

My connecting flight to my vacation destination in Italy was canceled this morning, so I got to spend the afternoon in Vienna with my wife and kids. Strudel and einspanner at Cafe Mozart, brats from a wurst stand, the CAT train, Stephensplatz, it was all a good reminder why Vienna is such a great city.

Melbourne is the world&#x27;s most leavable city.<p>Honest mistake on their part. I think the exodus count is over 50,000 so far.

As someone who lives nearby and is even pretty happy with living here most of the time, let me tell you that Calgary being third on this list is comically absurd. It&#x27;s an ok city in many ways, but approximately the only way it&#x27;s a <i>better</i> city than the other two canadian cities on the list is that average income is fairly high (for now) in Alberta, and especially in oil company boardrooms in Calgary, again because of a resurgent oil boom due to the russian invasion of ukraine.

As a German: Any &quot;livability&quot; classification of cities that has Frankfurt in the top 10 has definitely some issues. It&#x27;s a place to pass through, at best.

Haha most livable if you’re a white German speaking European

So Auckland dropped 33 places just because of few Covid cases ? It is true that we had a peak of Covid cases this year, but it was never really massive by international standards.<p>At the same time, Auckland is pretty dead for a while now, especially the CBD. Traffic is not that bad, but we haven&#x27;t recovered at all from Covid. We will see in the next few months if cruise ships and tourists are back or not.

First of all, I&#x27;m not sure who this index is supposed to help. The EIU puts a new version out every year, but keeps pretty much all of it paywalled - I can&#x27;t imagine who would be willing to pay a few hundred euros to find out that Western Europe is a nice place to live in.<p>Secondly, it&#x27;s funny to see how variable the scores are from one year to the next - with rare exceptions (e.g. Kiev right now) cities don&#x27;t really change that much in the short term.<p>A few other small observations:<p>1. It&#x27;s absolutely comical that Frankfurt ranks 7th. I know the city quite well, it shouldn&#x27;t crack the top 50 in any vaguely sane ranking.<p>2. It&#x27;s also plainly weird that Istanbul is Western Europe but Budapest is Eastern Europe, together with Tashkent, which is comfortably to the East of all of Iran.<p>3. Why no breakdown for Southern Europe&#x2F;the Mediterranean?<p>Year after year when going over these rankings I&#x27;m left with the same impression - arbitrary tastes and cultural flexing + some basic common sense observations, all masquerading as science.

PDF document with some more details (but still not the whole list):<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.eiu.com&#x2F;rs&#x2F;753-RIQ-438&#x2F;images&#x2F;liveability-index-2022.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.eiu.com&#x2F;rs&#x2F;753-RIQ-438&#x2F;images&#x2F;liveability-inde...</a><p>(Need to provide an e-mail address to get the above link.)

How can Calgary and Vancouver be next to Vienna and Copenhagen. That list must be rigged.

From personal experience, Vienna tops the list of places to go see the locals doing the old 1930&#x27;s style stiff arm salute. If described in terms of cake, as it probably should be, Vienna is a layered sponge cake, two thick wedges of art and culture sandwiching a smaller middle layer of right-wing reactionary local politics.

It might be rendered poorly at my end, but what&#x27;s the idea behind the first chart? I&#x27;m not able to make sense of it. It seems to present the same thing (city liveability index) three times, and all the cities are just thrown on there in no particular order. Honolulu is even off the charts, which indicates that there&#x27;s some intention of an axis somewhere, but I can&#x27;t tell what it is. Edit: Ah, it was missing a world map rendered in the background. Now it makes sense.

This list seems awful. How is Istanbul ranked this low? Almost all Chinese cities seem incredibly underrated, Beijing and Shanghai on a level with Athens, some of the top &#x27;second tier&#x27; cities on par with Latin American cities? Dubai and Abu Dhabi as &#x27;livable&#x27;, not for the workers there, that&#x27;s for sure. If you wanted to put a positive spin on it you can say the Economist knows its readership very well.

Anyone else notice that the text labels on the image &quot;Vienna waits for you&quot; aren&#x27;t embedded as part of the image itself, but rather distinct divs overlaid, meaning you can highlight&#x2F;copy&#x2F;etc. the text.<p>Is this common? &#x2F; any ideas on why they&#x27;ve done it this way? It&#x27;s cool, but surely adds unnecessary complexity and require testing to ensure it displays as expected on different devices.

I&#x27;m from and live in Vienna. It truly is a great city to live in. Feel free to AMA.

&quot;The war in Ukraine is also weighing on liveability. There is no score in 2022 for Kyiv because the eiu’s correspondent had to abandon the survey when fighting broke out&quot;

Heavily biased towards costal US &#x2F; Western European cities; ignoring the changes in liveability that takes place elsewhere (Asia, Eastern Europe, mid-sized cities of the west).

office activity is taken as evidence of livability, rather than a consequence of a &#x27;let it rip&#x27; pandemic response policy + antediluvian bosses who hate remote

Does anyone have access to the full list? Curious whether SF went down from 2021 and also how San Jose ranks

I&#x27;m from Vienna.<p>Don&#x27;t believe it.<p>You&#x27;re welcome!

There should be some in-built bias, such as adding points for just being in the Northern America. Otherwise it&#x27;s hard to explain how all of the diverse cities of the USA end up being clumped in one place of the scale.<p>That, or not having sufficient dynamic range.

I haven&#x27;t seen what are the criteria for livability. I am not aware of the process used to apply those criteria. I am not aware of the credentials of the people&#x2F;company who made the top.<p>So I don&#x27;t care about such a top.

&quot;... according to one magazine&quot;