TORONTO – A recent competition has changed how some rank a “liveable city,” by including factors such as pollution levels and green space.
But the new ranking may have some Canadians seeing red, with Toronto dropping numerous spots to eighth place and Vancouver being notably absent from the index.
The Economist Intelligence Unit, who regularly releases a standard list of liveable cities, teamed up with data-sharing company BuzzData to host a competition that opened up the liveable cities index. The new approach offered participants the chance to innovate and provide new insight into what makes a city liveable.
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Jon Copestake, the editor of the EIU’s Cost of Living and Liveability surveys, explained why they changed their approach.
“If there’s one thing that becomes apparent when working on rankings, especially rankings that are close to people’s hearts (or wallets) like liveability and the cost of living, it’s that everyone has an opinion,”
said Copestake.
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Because these two rankings elicit such a strong public reaction, they wanted to open up a competition.
Many of the “best cities” entries received fell into two categories: those that expressed city data in a visually impressive way, and those that added value to the process by incorporating new data into the rankings.
The winning entry was Filippo Lovato, whose ranking looked at 70 cities and factored in things like green space, connectivity, pollution levels and sprawl.
In the end, the city of Hong Kong topped Lovato’s list.
“Hong Kong…is a very compact city that has managed to maintain its natural heritage, create a dense network of green spaces and enjoy extensive links to the rest of the world,” said Lovato of the winning city.
Lovato’s top ten may have some city dwellers seeing red – the top cities in the EIU’s standard liveability ranking were notably absent from his list, including top performers Vancouver and Melbourne.
As explained on The Economist blog, Lovato only examined 70 cities, rather than the 140 in the EIU’s ranking. He narrowed his choices by picking the biggest and most geographically diverse cities, excluding “Melbourne, Vancouver and Vienna, which occupy the top three slots in the main EIU table.”
“Filippo’s Spatially Adjusted Livability Index is a fantastic example of someone taking a data set-park surface area-that is
available across hundreds of cities, and creatively adapting it into a tool to quantify quality of life,” said competition judge David Eaves.
“It is exactly the kind of innovative analysis using data, particularly open data, that gets me excited about what the future holds.”
The top 10
- Hong Kong (87.8 = Spatial Adjusted Liveability
Index) - Amsterdam (87.4)
- Osaka (87.4)
- Paris (87.1)
- Sydney (86.0)
- Stockholm (86.0)
- Berlin (85.9)
- Toronto (85.4)
- Munich (85.1)
- Tokyo (84.3)
Torontonians will be happy to see their city made the top ten, however the Big Smoke saw the biggest drop in ranking, sitting now at 8th place, compared to first place in the EIU’s standard liveability index.
In Lovato’s index, Toronto received weak scores for isolation and cultural assets.
The bottom 10
- Tehran (47.7)
- Nairobi (47.4)
- Lusaka (44.7)
- Phnom Penh (44.6)
- Karachi (42.8)
- Dakar (41.9)
- Abidjan (41.0)
- Dhaka (37.9)
- Lagos (34.8)
- Harare (33.4)
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