Is that a bad thing? I’ve smelled much worse things. Like Ross County, Ohio, which smells like boiled cabbage.
As to why Americans are listing only American cities, I think it could be seen as being in bad taste to trash developing countries. Think of the Slumdog Millionaire, “poverty porn” controversy - if Americans listed only cities in Africa, India, etc. someone could point out that they didn’t understand the rich culture that lived on there despite the poverty, not to mention the role the western world played in creating the postcolonial poverty. I bet that many cities in war-torn countries are not pleasant places to live, but I hesitate to list them because I have never lived there myself. For instance, a friend of mine recently visited northeastern Quebec, and she couldn’t begin to figure out what she made of the combination of depressing poverty and isolation, and the fascinating preservation of traditional life that went on there - I certainly wouldn’t list that here, and insult the Innu residents, without having even seen it myself.
I have no suggestions - the worst place I’ve visited recently was Windsor, Ontario.
I’ve never actually been there, but everything I’ve heard about it suggests to me that Dubai’s foundation is built on sand, literally and metaphorically. I’m not a fan of the Middle Eastern worldview to begin with, but Dubai seems to combine the worst of the Arab world and Western culture, built on the backs of indentured servants and completely unsustainable. Its entire reason for being is to attract tourist and investment dollars from people willing to overlook the many things that are truly wrong and unnatural about the city.
It’s as soulless as Vegas, yet it seems worse to me.
kathmandu, BahneSidhe, and RickJay, can any of you come up with an iconic example of what it is that makes Regina more loathsome than the rest? It’s not that I disagree, I demanded a recount the last time we weren’t number one in the Canadian murder per capita statistics, but I’ve got a day off coming up and I’ve already done all the tourist stuff.
I’ll be another one to stand up for Vegas. There’s a lot more to it than the strip. I thought it was actually pretty nice. Too hot and dry for my liking, but I’ve seen far worse.
I haven’t travelled much, but the most squalor I’ve seen would be Nogales, Mexico (border town snuggled up to Nogales, AZ). Filth in the streets, homes made out of pieces of particle board leaning against each other, garbage everywhere. The high, thick concrete wall marking the border was a demarcation line of night and day. Day was the AZ side with neat homes and clean yards, and a few feet away on the other side was just absolute filth.
Sure made me appreciate my quality of life.
And I’ve heard from a few people that Hamilton, Ontario, is the butt-hole of Canada. I can’t back that up with any personal experience. Just sayin’.
I visited Managua, Nicaragua a couple weeks ago. Certainly don’t plan on going back, but I’ve never been to Newark so I can’t really rate it on the worldwide scale of loathsomeness 
As to a couple of the other places mentioned:
Regina: a rather pleasant place to visit when you live down the road in Moose Jaw.
Hamilton: the steel mills are ugly but beyond that, it’s an average industrial city. Has the same level of culture of any other city of half a million residents.
Places I’ve been that make my skin crawl: Dhaka, Bangladesh; Chennai and Delhi, India; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; parts of Dubai, UAE; Cairo, Egypt; large parts of Manila, Phillippines.
Was this before the recent tax increase on cigarettes? Because that made a lot of people who were kind of borderline on the “pack of cigarettes v. life” value in my estimation slide under.
As for me, I’ve been a lot of places I disliked including some dangerous and awful slums and some just baboon’s ass ugly, bleak and nasty places, but I’ve never once thought I’ve seen anything remotely approaching record setting in its wretched-hive-of-villainy-citychlorian count.
Sounds like an arsehole of a place.
[quote=“ianzin, post:74, topic:494931”]
Of all the places I have actually visited, Canberra is probably in with a shout. Perhaps not the most loathsome city in absolute terms, but it’s the sort of place that takes bland, non-entity-ness to a prize-winning level. It is more or less true to say that it only exists as a bloated compromise because two great cities couldn’t decide which should be the capital, and that its only purpose is to provide a home for politicians, administrators and paper-pushers… in other words, all the besuited tax leeches and dregs of society that make modern life so much less pleasant than it could be.
QUOTE]
Canberra is just boring but it has good public transport and infrastructure. I have staggered home from the casino at 2 am quite a number of times and never had a problem. I don’t think it makes the finals.
Poowong. Don’t let the name fool ya - it’s not as nice as it sounds.
Ok, it’s a town, not a city… but it has enough loathsome to qualify.
Well, now I can’t rest until you tell us WHY it’s so awful! It looks like a nice place?
I was informed once that the Virgin Islands were a poor vacation choice, being absolutely filthy and littered, but that doesn’t make them loathsome in my book. London is also filthy and littered and expensive, but people are eager to go there.
How about Pyongyang?
Agree, especially about the security part. You don’t need a lot of lead time to make your flight, that’s for sure. I’ll admit my outlook is formed by the fact that I’ve been significantly delayed getting out of KC a lot, which I guess is more a bitch about the weather than the airport itself. The coffee there is horrible, though. Probably not enough to render KC the most loathsome city in the world, however. But close (it’s really bad).
Airport aside, KC is cool. You can definitely hang there, which I did not suspect before I traveled there.
Baku. Azerbaijan.
Corruption to a higher level. a stinking festering hell-hole of rip off merchants and back stabbing slime balls. A dry dusty windy city of potholes and high rises, chic bars and restuarants and sauna parlours with no steam just seedy cheap hookers
the worst type.
they will have their arm around your shoulders uttering platitudes and sweet words … but the warm feeling you get is only because they are pissing down your leg at the same time.
International viewers of CNN… see that azerbaijan tourist advert? That chubby chick with the smile and the make up at the end? She is the president’s daughter.
Second bet.
Any town in South Korea. If the northern idiots nuked them off the peninsular I wouldn’t bat an eyelid.
Wow this was a rant… maybe I have some unresolved issues heheh!
I like Baku. Maybe there’s something very, very wrong with me :smack:
For me, Ourense in Spain is awful, small dirty, dark boring, depressing uneventful and then some.
I also did not like Milan, Italy.
In the Dominican Republic…hmm too many crappy towns to choose from.
I’ve only been to the KC airport a couple of times, but who in the hell puts security checkpoints at the entry to the gate area, which have no fucking bathrooms!!! If you need to take a piss, or get something to eat or read, you have to leave the gate area and go through security again! That’s crazy.
Damn you! I was going to post Gibsonton. My husband did plumbing for a while and had a few jobs down there. Said it was the nastiest, scariest shithole he’d ever been in. And he is 3rd generation Tampa, so that says something.
I know that there are far worse places than Tampa, Florida. However, I just escaped from there after 16 years. It has horrid traffic, bad planning, road flooding, corruption, severe class issues and honestly, it is ugly. It has every single one of the disadvantages of a large city with virtually none of the benefits. Hell, they are most famous for a celebration that is basically a ripoff of Mardi Gras, and instead of floats, they use boats.
God what a shithole town it is.
When I read the OP I was going to ask how there could be any debate regarding Las Vegas’ inherently superior loathsomeness on any number of measurements…but your OP is more specific and Vegas isn’t that loathsome on those measures.
As a rule of thumb, however, Vegas has to be considered the most spiritually loathsome city on earth. It’s hard to imagine a place in the world (that isn’t torn by war or something similar) that has a deeper feeling of sadness, emptiness and general despair running through it all the time. (As well as painfully ugly once you leave the strip.)
But it sure is fun in tiny doses.