There's nothing that appeals to the parochialism of local governments and newspapers more than those dubious "most livable cities" indexes. In Australia, of course, they're seen as yet another contest between Sydney and Melbourne, with Melbourne usually (but not always) coming out on top.
Leaving aside the fact that nobody ever seems to delve too deeply into the methodologies of these indexes, which are dispensed annually to the media by a variety of institutions and who knows how consistent they are from year to year and which supposedly measure and compare quality of life based on factors such as average incomes and costs of living, crime rates, public transport, education levels etc, what really amazes me about these lists is that they are treated as some sort of horse race ("Bratislava cracks the top 100 livable cities"), and they only ever seem to be interpreted as providing good news. Nobody ever seems to question why their own city might fall in a ranking, or ask whether there might be something to learn from the fact that, say, Melbourne, which still uses the "most livable city" tag line A LOT, was last decreed to be the most livable city in 1993. We're not really interested in asking ourselves why other cities may be more livable, we only want to know where we place in the form guide so we can feel smug about it.
It's this lack of questioning of either the methodologies or the reasons for changes in rankings, particularly in terms of what, if anything, we may be able to learn from such changes that I find so funny every year when the results are "reported" in the papers. If we did look a little closer, we might find more than a few questions worth asking.
In 2007, Mercer ranked Melbourne as number 19, behind Sydney at number 9 (somewhat mind boggling given that public transport is meant to be one of the key factors in the index, and let's face it Melbourne's transport is vastly superior to Sydney's shambolic excuse for a "system"). The top city was Zurich, which happens to have the densest metropolitan public transport (trams mostly) network in the world; I visited Zurich for only a few days in 2008 and just from that I can say it is a great city and one that functions very well. Number two on the list was Geneva, and number three was Vancouver. No surprises there for any students of urbanism; Vancouver does not have all those books written about it for nothing!
In 2008, the Economist put Vancouver in first place, followed by Melbourne and Vienna, while Sydney tied for 9th with Geneva and Zurich. Why the huge difference in the space of just 12 months for poor old Sydney and the Swiss metropolises? This year, the Economist puts Melbourne back to third place; Sydney still ties for ninth with Zurich.
It's not that these indexes aren't interesting, but what concerns me is our insistence on treating them like a horse race as it distracts us from learning anything from them; the results are inevitably held up by politicians to justify their inaction on urban affairs, but they should be using them as just one tool for assessing how we can improve our cities and make them better. Instead, all they do is justify the status quo. If it were the Olympics, we would not rest until we'd taken the "Gold" from Vancouver and Zurich and we'd be throwing as many government millions at it as it took to make that happen; as it just concerns something like our quality of life rather than the national pride supposedly imbued in elite sporting success, we'll just congratulate ourselves for making the list at all and leave it at that.
