Digital nomads look away: Copenhagen is not your dream city, study confirms

Have to say, having grown up there and moved away for uni, it's quite a nice city. I have friends and family across the globe, people that I knew growing up, and of all the places, Cph is probably one of the best:

- Town centre has everything in close proximity, and is walkable. It's reasonably dense too, so chances are you don't have to walk far.

- The lakes give the place breathing room that is unlike any other city. They're large but not like a river where there's very limited crossings. Eg by comparison London is very much cut in two by the Thames.

- There's a whole theme park right in the middle of town, you don't have a to do a whole day trip in a car to get to it. And there's another one just north of town, also easily accessed by train.

- Public transport works, even for kids. Can't stress how big a deal I've found this to be once I discovered it having moved to other cities. You can cycle in many, many places too, including as a kid. That mobility really means you can have quite a different social life to many other places. You don't need your parents to drive you everywhere, and you can do several things the same day.

- Yes, taxes are high. But if you're remote, how long do you really want to be there anyway? It's cold and dark in the winter. Summers are perfect, sun is out late but not too late, weather is warm but not oppressive.

- Everyone speaks English. Even kids.

It's unclear how these cities were exactly ranked by category, e.g. how London is supposedly the #1 cultural city. The methodology page [0] simply lists EuroMonitor, MasterCard, Time Out, and World Stadiums as sources for Cultural Attractions. Seems pretty arbitrary.

Most cities are pretty expensive to live in. As a DN, the main thing I care about is how complex the visa process is and what kinds of visas are available. Then, the public transportation situation. The rest can be subjective, and expenses etc can be lowered by not living directly in the city.

edit: The thing about these sorts of rankings are they're just subjective. I would say Seoul deserves a significantly higher rating, but I actually speak Korean and value what Seoul offers. If you don't speak Korean or care about public transportation etc, then Seoul is going to have a much lower ranking. Similarly, Germany is just less appealing to me because I speak little German. (I know many people speak English there, but life is just far easier when you speak the primary language.)

[0]: https://www.workmotion.com/best-remote-work-cities

[1]: https://nomadlist.com/

It seems digital nomads did not look away, and instead hugged the site to death. Anyone have an archive link?

What is a Digital Nomad? I sometimes wonder if I'm one. In a world where careers (like people had in the 80, 90s and earlier) are dead and gone, where corporations want employees to move around as serifs, does that make us all digital nomads? Unable to put down roots, to build personal value, to afford a house? (As if sufficient housing has been built at any time during my lifetime anywhere close to where I would like to live...)

If you're a nomad you probably don't own a house, and every popular city looks bad from a financial perspective.