Vienna named world’s most liveable city

Earlier this month, Austria’s capital Vienna was named as the world’s most liveable city by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Global Liveability Index.

The Austrian city usurped Australian city Melbourne to first place, with the antipodean city having held the title for the past seven years.

“A long-running contender to the title, Vienna has succeeded in displacing Melbourne from the top spot due to increases in the Austrian capital’s stability category ratings,” the report said, referring to one of the index’s five headline components.

While both Vienna and Melbourne scored maximum points in the healthcare, education and infrastructure categories, and Melbourne extended its lead in the culture and environment component, this was outweighed by Vienna’s improved stability ranking.

One of the sub-categories that Vienna performed particularly well in was the prevalence of petty crime. The Austrian capital is proven to be one of the safest cities in Europe,

Japanese city Osaka, Calgary in Canada and Australia’s-largest city Sydney completed the top five places in the survey.

According to the EIU itself, the study does tend to favour medium-sized cities in wealthy countries, which boast relatively low population densities, over larger and more crowded cities – which often tend to have higher crime rates and more strained infrastructure.

At the opposite end of the Index, war-torn Damascus in Syria was ranked the least liveable city, closely followed by Dhaka in Bangladesh and Lagos in Nigeria.

London was ranked in a lowly 48th place out of the 140 cities measured for the Index, although Manchester saw the biggest improvement of any European city, rising by 16 places to rank 35th.

EIU’s top ten most liveable cities (overall score in brackets)

Top of Form

  1. Vienna, Austria (99.1)
  2. Melbourne, Australia (98.4)
  3. Osaka, Japan (97.7)
  4. Calgary, Canada (97.5)
  5. Sydney, Australia (97.4)
  6. Vancouver, Canada (97.3)
  7. Toronto, Canada (97.2)
  8. Tokyo, Japan (97.2)
  9. Copenhagen, Denmark (96.8)
  10. Adelaide, Australia (96.6)

Article published 31st August 2018