Rankings provide a memorable tool for organising complex information, but there are several common challenges, which can inadvertently cause them to caricature the complex realities of urban life. Much of it is welcomed by cities confronting issues such as housing affordability, ageing populations and spikes in air pollution and congestion. The rise of liveability rankings and other comparative information has generated a trove of data. A bad ranking can add significant pressure to city leaders, while positive news can help them to argue the merits of past or future policies.įrequency of terms used in titles of rankings and benchmarks, relating to quality of life worldwide, from 2009 to 2019. Larger cities often have departments that draw on city performance measures, and monitoring teams that keep track of relevant studies to manage the risks and opportunities the results may present. Most city rankings weren’t intended to guide policy, but they certainly attract the attention of mayors and city leaders all over the world. The question, then, is how to improve the measurements used, to ensure that the rankings align with the public interest, and help those in positions of leadership – such as lawmakers, local governments and urban planners – to better understand the huge array of data they have access to. Yet the sheer volume and variety of data and benchmarks, as well as the growing number of institutions interested in producing them, suggest that city rankings are here to stay. At the last count, there were more than 30 urban liveability indexes produced worldwide, and more than 500 measures and benchmarks comparing cities.Įach new round of results triggers debate over the biases and blind spots of these comparisons. Global institutions including UN Habitat and the OECD are also joining consultancies, media organisations and think tanks, in the quest to compare living standards and well-being in cities. Every year, the world’s most “liveable” cities are celebrated, in city rankings published by Mercer, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Monocle Magazine.
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