Three Canadian cities land in top five for best livability

The latest livability survey has been released by The Economist, and of the 140 most livable cities in the world, Melbourne, Australia remains on top.

The Australian city is followed closely by the Austrian capital, Vienna, then Canada’s Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary.

According to The Economist, every city is assigned a rating of relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure. Each factor in a city is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. For qualitative indicators, a rating is awarded based on the judgment of in-house analysts and in-city contributors. For quantitative indicators, a rating is calculated based on the relative performance of a number of external data points.

The least livable cities in the world, according to the report, are Damascus, Syria, Tripoli, Libya, and Lagos, Nigeria.

The concept of livability is simple: it assesses which locations around the world provide the best or the worst living conditions. Assessing livability has a broad range of uses, from benchmarking perceptions of development levels to assigning a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s livability rating quantifies the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in any given location and allows for direct comparison between locations.

Of the poorer-scoring cities, 13 continue to occupy the very bottom tier of livability, where ratings fall below 50 per cent and most aspects of living are severely restricted.

“It may be argued that violent crime is on an upward trend in the top tier of cities, but these observations are not always correct,” reads the report. “According to the most recently released statistics, after a record low number of murders in 2013, Vancouver saw its murder rate increase in 2014, but 2013 and 2014 were still the years with the lowest national murder rates in Canada since 1966. Although crime rates are perceived as rising in Australia, the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located, recorded a crime rate of 7,489.5 per 100,000 people in 2013/14.”

In Austria, the murder rate was just 0.5 per 100,000 people in 2014. In the same year, there were reports that only nine murders had been recorded in Vienna, a city of 1.74 m people, with a murder rate matching the national average.