Much as it pains a West Australian to even acknowledge our brethren in the east, once again Melbourne is acclaimed as the most livable city in the world for expatriates.
… but small moue of dissent, however: Melbourne gets a top rating for its weather? Four-seasons-in-one-day Melbourne? Rainy, cloudy, drizzly, chilly, dreary Melbourne? Whereas beautiful Perth, the sunniest city in Australia, gets a secondary rating? Not that I’m biases toward Perth, of course…
Rounding out the top 15 cities:
1= Melbourne
1= Vancouver
1= Vienna
4 Perth
5 Geneva
6= Adelaide
6= Brisbane
6= Copenhagen
6= Montreal
6= Oslo
6= Sydney
6= Zurich
13= Helsinki
13= Stockholm
13= Toronto
Heh, sounds a lot like the Virginia Tech campus. As I write, the town is one thick sheet of ice, a big change from 40-degree-F temperatures this afternoon (that’s warm for here this time of year).
These surveys really do mean nothing unless, no even if, you know the criteria they rank them on. If livable means safest, or availability of good health care or whatever it is easy to get some strange results.
I checked out Melbourne as a possible expat location last year and frankly did not rate it. That said from what I have seen I could understand it still being regarded the best Australian city.
Any ranking that has Australian, Scandanavian and Swiss cities dominating the lists has got to be pretty conservative in it’s criteria or assumptions - or maybe “dullness” is a positive criteria for expats?
(puts on helmet and awaits shitstorm of abuse)
But seriously - how can the cities where everybody wants to go not figure? London, New York, Paris? Only Sydney probably qualifies on both basis…
All that said and done, I ended up expating in Luanda Angola so maybe it is just my priorities that are off base!!
Seeing as Amsterdam and Dublin didn’t make the Top 20, but Geneva and Zürich did, I’m guessing “Is this city fun to live in?” wasn’t one of the questions on the survey.
At a guess I’d say that any ranking that has Australian, Scandanavian and Swiss cities dominating the lists is giving a high weighting to social problems. We are far from perfect but just find an Australian news site - like News or The Sydney Morning Herald and check out how tame our local news is.
I’ll take that rather than living in interesting times.
On the weather business, Jervoise, I was having just this discussion with someone from Perth yesterday. What I told her: Perth has climate. Melbourne has weather.
I remember reading some survey of the best places to live back in 1991 or so and Honolulu got points off because our weather was too perfect. “Monotonous” was the term they used in the big fat grid at the back of the book. I suspect that the errors bars on all these cities are quite large.
But for some reason I always find myself looking at them and nodding approval when we make the top tier. Good ol’ human nature.
Given that Vancouver tied for first (we’re number 1!) and there’s been a lot of fuss over the last few years over whether we’re “No Fun City”, that’s probably the case.
Just because our police have had a phobia of any public gathering of more than two people since that little Stanley Cup riot 10 years ago…
And for those discussing the weather, it’s pretty monotonous here. Rain, more rain, the sun might peek out a few times in the summer, then back to yet more rain.
(Hobart’s too small to make the list.)