The events of last week had a lot of South Africans questioning the liveability of our cities.

At the same time, the Economist Intelligence Unit was working out the final scores for the most and least liveable cities in the world.

You’d expect cities like New York to make the list, but no North American cities cracked the top 10.

Instead, Vienna came out on top for the second year running.

Over to Moneyweb:

“Overall, our index remains dominated by medium-sized cities in wealthy countries,” the report notes, pointing to high-quality education, well-funded public healthcare and functional transport systems. These cities—with populations that number anywhere from 1 million to 3 million—hit the sweet spot between overcrowded and underdeveloped.

“The upsides of these cities tend to be fully realised. You get a good collection of cultural activities, you get good access to healthcare and education,” said EIU’s regional director for Asia, Duncan Innes-Ker. “But you don’t get a lot of downsides that tend to come with big cities, things like traffic congestion, crime problems and general wear and tear.”

Before we break down how Vienna reached their score, here’s a summary of the results for 2019:

According to the Index, the liveability score is reached through category weights.

[Category weights] are equally divided into relevant subcategories to ensure that the score covers as many indicators as possible. Indicators are scored as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. These are then weighted to produce a rating, where 100 means that liveability in a city is ideal and 1 means that it is intolerable.

Categories are weighted in the following way:

• Category 1: Stability (weight: 25%% of total)
• Category 2: Healthcare (weight: 20%% of total)
• Category 3: Culture & Environment (weight: 25%% of total)
• Category 4: Education (weight: 10%% of total)
• Category 5: Infrastructure (weight: 20%% of total)

Sub-categories take into account things like crime rates, the threat of terror, the quality of and accessibility to healthcare, availability, and quality of education, infrastructure and access to common necessities like clean water, communication and manageable cost of living.

A breakdown of the top 10:

Also, a breakdown of the 10 least liveable cities:

Harare cracked a place in the list of the 10 most unliveable cities. You can add that to Robert Mugabe’s legacy.

(By the way, if you want to really understand Mugabe’s legacy, this Mail & Guardian piece by Simon Allison is where you should start.)

To round things off, here’s a list of the world’s most expensive cities.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2019 Safe Cities Index is also worth a read

Knowledge is power.

[sources:eiu&moneyweb]