Best cities ranking and report (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Best cities ranking and report (2012)

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27 pointsmazsa47 comments

I'm not sure there's a point in ranking cities. I've lived in a handful of the cities listed, and their ranking has very little to do with my own perception of them. Cities are a bit like people in the sense that they have a character, you can fall in love with a quirky city and be bored out of your mind with one that looks great on paper (I'm looking at you Toronto).

I guess that highly ranked cities are more likely to be a pleasant place to live to the average person. As for myself, I've noticed climate and warmth of people are my own best indicators.

That Amsterdam scores poor on the isolation metric doesn't mean much. The Netherlands don't have many big cities in the first place. But the area around Amsterdam is filled with lots of small towns (though I could say that about the entire country) and train connections to other big cities like Utrecht and Rotterdam are very good.

In a relatively densely populated country like the Netherlands it is a joke...

It's silly, the Randstad region is one of the largest and densely populated metropolitan areas in Europe.

Hong Kong does indeed have a surprising amount of accessible green space. However, you can only call it the world's best city in terms of "Spatial Adjusted Liveability" if you entirely ignore the stratospheric rentals that lead to a whole lot of people living like this:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/propertypicturegalleries...

How about the 'green space' per capita... How does Hong Kong rank there?

Bizarre not to include Melbourne regardless if Sydney is a proxy.

It is the world's most liveable city (according to Economist) and the world's third best city (according to Monocle). You wouldn't say Miami is a proxy for New York City.

They also forgot Vancouver, Vienna, Geneva, and Zurich, all of which regularily make it into the top 10 in such rankings. They probably argue that Munich is a proxy for Vienna and Zurich...

"""The availability of world-class cultural assets is crucial to liveability."""

I take issue with the word crucial. Like others I do not think the list is going to sync with everyone's needs. Did anyone else manage to find the weighting for each of these factors/variables? It would be nice if we could add our own weighting and see which city comes out on top. I am looking at Vancouver these days and sad to see it not included.

Yeah I think that using just UNESCO sites as a metric is a bit flawed. I mean on a scale from 1 to 5 (from good to bad) Rome gets 1, Paris 3 and New York City 4.

I live in Rome and I love it, but I wouldn't say that even if we have a bunch of UNESCO sites, the cultural assets of the city are that much better than Paris or NYC.

I think they ought to divide cultural assets into what I would loosely call "Heritage" and "Modern culture".

On the Heritage scale, Rome is an undisputed [global?] leader. On Modern Culture scale, Paris is perhaps ahead (I've not been to NYC but imagint it's the leader here).

These scales' appeal varies for different people.

UPD: UNESCO sites headcount is a deeply flawed metric anyway. I've heard that South Korea has more UNESCO sites than India, which proves it is 1% history, 99% lobbying.

An important criterion is missing: the quality of human interaction.

How nice and attentive your average vendors, service providers, random strangers you ask for directions are do affect your experience in myriad ways.

In fact, it may inversely correlate with spatial density. The optimal density is likely not the highest possible, as the report implies. Hong Kong is notorious for its stratospheric real estate prices. This likely contributes to the rush way average citizens, esp. lower-income service personnel, e.g. 7-11 employees, spend their time--they need to make ends meet or to fulfill strict quota set by business owners who need to pay those high rents.

There are definite flaws in the criteria developed but I acknowledge no system is going to be perfect. I don't necessarily agree with the effect of sprawl on overall quality of life and ranking of a city. I like cities less densely populated.

Sprawl struck me as a curious factor too. I can see it both ways - less sprawl means you don't have to go so far out of the city to get into the countryside; more sprawl means there are potentially affordable suburban areas whence you can easily commute into the city.

London, for instance, is pretty sprawling, but many of the commuter towns or villages are actually very pleasant, desirable places to live (they can also be extremely expensive - though not so bad, of course, as central London, which is prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn't an oil sheikh).

I view it differently. Sprawl means you're never where things happen. Everything is somewhere else, and you get there in a car. With dense cities, everything is at your doorstep, and that makes it much more likely that you'll actually participate in great and exciting things and events.

They rated Boston a 5 (worst). Boston is a pretty compact city, and you definitely don't need a car.

You don't need a car for London sprawl - buses or tube are pretty good.

As someone who lived in cities with pretty big variations of sprawl (ranging from Dallas to downtown Tokyo), I feel like density is positively correlated with ease of living.

This obviously depends on your priorities, but being able to walk to the grocery store is a nice experience. I don't have a garden right now, but the public greenery I have access to are usually nicer-kept and I can do 80% of the things I would do in my yard anyways (picnics and the like).

The utility of density is very dependent on lifestyle, obviously, but if you haven't tried spending some time in a really dense area, I'd recommend it. You might find that you won't miss the things you thought you would.

The best kinds of these things are web pages where you can fiddle with the parameters to get your own ranking. For instance, I need sunlight, some warm weather, and places to go outdoors. Others could not care less about that and place much more weight on other things.

Monocle is as close to a perfect ranking system as I've seen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World's_most_liveable_cities

Atlanta gets to be artificially high on the list, next to actual nice cities like Boston and NYC, because it gets a 1 in connectivity.

I guess that's because of our famous busiest airport in the world! Too bad if you want to go anywhere in the city, though.

The public transit system only goes every 20 minutes in a + shape, makes everyone coming from the airport buy an NFC card, and the speakers and upcoming train monitors in every station are unusable and broken. People in Atlanta like driving so much they force everyone else to do it along with them.

Yeah, what is that? "The great thing about living in Atlanta is that it's so easy to leave!"

We also have an abundance of green space and really low cost of living. Personally, I love Atlanta, and I wish people would stop putting it down all the time. Could be a really great city with a little more love.

It's funny how in Atlanta you can tell the people that love cars and never take the train. They say things like "the public transit system only goes every 20 minutes". Just because you ride the train once to a football game and it was slow doesn't mean it's like that every day. During rush hour on business days the train runs 2-5 minutes.

Oh, the route I was thinking of was Gold Line past Lindbergh on the weekends, or to the airport all week.

It does get faster on the weekdays (every 12 minutes?) if you're closer to downtown, but how much of the customer base is that?

Interesting that Hong Kong topped the list. I have only spent 1 1/2 days in Hong Kong but I really liked it. A friend moved there about five years ago because he could get long term research funding (for AI) and he seems to like it there.

This study is ranking for best cities, interesting enough, but I would like to see rankings of best places to live, in cities or not. I like to visit beautiful cities but live in the mountains.

Doesn't Hong Kong have pollution close to China levels?

And I see Washington DC at #14 which is in the top 20 cities with the highest crime rates in the USA.

This is one weird report.

China is a big place.

Hong Kong doesn't have anywhere near the pollution of Beijing or Shanghai.

I think it's because of the way they're weighting "world class cultural assets".

It sounds like these are basically tourist spots. Museums, and national heritage sites and things like that. DC has got TONS of those sorts of things, so it would make sense that it would rank high (at least abnormally high in that category)

Having lived in Stockholm, now living in London I'm not sure how their pollution ranking can be comparable.

I've lived in Toronto and I love-hate it. If the authors of the report had spent one day commuting to work in the city or looking for a condo to buy on an average salary I'm pretty sure Toronto wouldn't be up high in a "best city" ranking.

Having fairly recently been to Hong Kong (#1) and Phnom Penh (bottom 10) I wouldn't say HK was that much more liveable. Indeed the air made my eyes sting. The wages would be far higher in HK though.

I've spent years in Hong Kong and months on Phnom Penh. They're not even in the same league. Hong Kong is one of the most developed cities in the world, Phnom Penh is one of the least. I honestly can't understand where you're coming from. The pollution? The air can get horrible (summer 2012..ughh), but it's pretty bad in Phnom Penh's also. Plus, the water and medical facilities are downright dangerous.

Toronto made it? Hard to believe. No way I'd live here if it weren't for the job. Way too expensive.

Even in their specific ratings Toronto does poorly (although better than it should), and yet somehow bad scores almost across the board adds up to good?

The total analysis is on page 13. The analysis on page 11 only covers "spatial characteristics", and TO doesn't do well on those, receiving a -7 adjustment.

I don't see any consideration of living costs and income, which is a really glaring flaw.

I questioned this myself, especially since when Canadians rank their own cities, Calgary and Ottawa come out tops.

Most of the time.

Happy Ottawan here.

what happened to the auto pdf warning?

I don't know, it was not me (i.e., not the submitter).

Whoops, I must have deleted that when I added 2012. Perils of late night edits.

(The software adds "[pdf]" on submission but doesn't add it back if you edit it out. This is so we can fix the occasional case where the software gets it wrong.)

thanks! the software used to add a link to scribd for pdfs. A pdf label that was added separately from the title text like that (but not a link) would help.

Note the date (2012)

Thanks. Added.

Is there an updated list?

What do you mean by an updated list?

Not 2012.

hmm... they rated Damascus but not Tel-Aviv or Jerusalem?! why is that?

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