The Economist publishes these annual “Liveable City” ratings, using arbitrary but plausible criteria and weightings to come up with lists that usually look pretty similar. Canadian cities do well. The Monocle favours certain European cities. Australia and Scandinavia tend to do well.
Based on your personal experiences only, places you have been to, what would you consider the most and least “liveable cities”?
Of all the cities I have actually lived in (for nearly two years) the one I found most livable was Zurich. One reason was the wonderful public transit. I enjoyed NYC, but there is a harshness to life there.
Fredericton, NB. Very friendly with a lot of charm. A provincial capital with the feel of a small town.
Portland, OR for me. I don’t consider myself well traveled but I’ve had nothing but good experiences there. Of course the relatives we were staying with were excellent tour guides. Too bad it’s so expensive to buy a house there.
It’s hard to know for certain based solely on a visit, but with that caveat, Berlin is the city I’ve found most personally appealing.
It’s the most populous city in Germany, but it’s spread out over a huge geographic area, so it doesn’t feel crowded, and the traffic wasn’t terrible. There’s a wide variety of food and cultural attractions, it’s a good transportation hub to the rest of Europe, and the people are pretty friendly. Also, because it doesn’t have the economic intensity of Munich or Frankfurt, it’s comparatively affordable.
Paris is my favorite city in the world, but only for visitation — the French bureaucracy is legendary and there’s no way I’d want to beat my head against that wall as a resident.
I love Montreal, and I’ve actually lived there, so it would be high on my list. Except for winter. So maybe Vancouver.
There’s a historical reason.
During the Cold War, West Berlin was not part of West Germany. It continued to be governed by France, UK and US. One consequence of this is that they didn’t have a voting representative in the Bundestag, only an observer.
But maybe more importantly, West Germany had conscription, and Germans who wanted to avoid the draft simply moved to Berlin. Which in turn din’t offer a lot of jobs in manufacturing, as opposed to all the industrial and trade hubs in the rest of the BRD.
So what you get is a city full of draft dogers, with liberal arts education, working with culture, media, advertising, education ASF.
It’s more than 30 years since the unification. and even though Berlin has seen quite a lot of gentrification and hipster-fication [Ku’damm certainly isn’t what it was in the 70’s], there’s still enough weird. On my last visit, I stayed close to a bar with a sign that said:
Frühstuck bis 17 uhr
It’s a special place where you find places serving breakfast to 5 p.m.
I was also informed by locals that the striking openness one finds in Berlin — wide streets, wide pedestrian pavements, lots of park space — is a side effect of the city having been utterly flattened during WWII. This left essentially a blank canvas for rebuilding, which they consciously chose to fill more sparsely than it had been before. The isolation of West Berlin during the Cold War would also have been a constraint on development, of course. I don’t know if there’s anything to this; they could be repeating legends, or just messing with a visitor. But more than one person said this to me.
Let’s see - of the top 10 in the economist list, I’ve only been in Geneva. I liked it a lot, but I preferred other cities I visited on that same trip more from a culture perspective - Helsinki, Tallinn, Paris. Others I’ve visited like Venice or London, while culturally great, had some big downsides.
I place a high premium on walkability and green space, for determining a city’s liveability.
I’d say Helsinki was the best, for me.
My wife has a more extensive travel history than me as that list goes, she’s also visited Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Melbourne of the top 10, she’s voting Copenhagen.
Houston is the worst automotive-centered hellhole I’ve ever visited, so it gets my vote for “least liveable”. When you can’t walk to the mall that’s 100m away, that you can see from your hotel, even if you were prepared to walk for an hour or two, that’s just completely unwalkable.
Can anyone post the Economist’s list? It’s paywalled.
Venice is a mind-blowing historical relic, absolutely worth visiting and exploring, but trying to live there, realistically, would be nightmarishly difficult. I have enormous sympathy for the small population of tourist-service people who have chosen, or are effectively required, to reside in this slowly decaying open-air architectural museum.
I agree, imagine trying to move house, or get a washing machine delivered. If you aren’t directly on a canal with your own mooring, you’re in big trouble. And that’s before we’ve even mentioned the flooding… home insurance must cost a fortune.
I’ve lived a lot of places (Juneau, Anchorage, California, Boston, Idaho, Washington, Frankfurt, Brussels, Lisbon, two cities in Africa, etc.) and visited a lot more. But visiting isn’t living, of course.
Based on personal criteria of walkability, access to services, public transportation, restaurants, etc., it would have to be Portland, OR. Most neighborhoods there are like small towns, with solid business districts supporting them. Where we lived, we had access to two bus lines and light rail. We could walk to two groceries, a farmers’ market, our doctor, dentist, and eye doctor, several banks, the vet, many food carts, and the best pizza on the west coast. Six years before we left there, I bought a 2016 Mazda. When we left in 2022, it had 12,000 miles on it. Yeah, the weather can be dismal, but it’s offset by all the rest.
I’ve sometimes thought that Fredericton would be a good retirement option for me. It’s like Ottawa, where I live, but built on a 1/10th scale. All the same things, very similar culture, just all much closer together.
I also wouldn’t mind living in Tokyo. Yes, it’s a vast city with a huge population, but with the trains everywhere, there’s no need for a car, and every neighborhood is like a little village unto itself, almost. Most everything you need to live within a few minutes walk of your home, and fast train ride to almost anything else you’d want.
I concur with Berlin, though it is slowly losing some charm and is no longer the most weird city you could imagine. Gentrification, normalisation, anglophilisation, me getting older… ah, well… But I know no other city that could top it.
It was mostly like this before the war already, but in some places the war offered more space indeed. It was not a blank canvas, the streets an their width remained mostly the same. Here you see Unter den Linden before the war, today it is basically the same (the trees have grown). Here is the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtnisskirche, today it is partly ruined and left like that on purpose. The layout of the streets has quite changed, but the space was there already. This must have been before the war, the Reichstag (upper left corner) still has the old cupola. The space is already there.
18:00 is more like it. And some breakfasts are truly helpful. One bar in Wedding (Taxi-something, it was called, don’t remember exactly) used to offer a “Kater-Fühstück” (hangover breakfast) for 1.50 Deutsche Mark in the 80’s. It consisted of a black coffee, a gitanes cigarrette without filter and an alka selzer. No wonder I don’t remember the name.
Actually they are known for being pretty grumpy, it is supposed to be part of their charm. If you had other experiences, lucky you.
And concerning the Economist’s list, yes, Vienna is nice. Food and drink are great, it is beautiful, well located. Pity about the accent. Budapest is also nice, for similar reasons. Pity about the government.
Grumpy is the right word, but in my experience Berliners have a kind of rough charm. They are direct and blunt, but mostly in a good-hearted way. For instance, expect to be called “Du” instead of the formal “Sie” in a typical Berliner restaurant or pub by default no matter your status or age, but that’s not disrespectful but rather a sign of friendly commonality.
My experience was, I would approach them with my limited German, and they laughed at me and switched to English. I laughed as well, agreeing that my German was amusingly clumsy. This was almost invariably a good start.
Very unlike Paris…
Another vote for Portland O. Although I lived there long ago. They still have one of the finest bookstores in the US (Powells).
I’d say Salt Lake City. It has a decent public transportation system, and not as bad a traffic problem as larger metropolises: it has buses and even some trolleys, and other than in rush hour, the roads are never clogged. Nature is only ever a couple miles away, and many places are also pretty walkable. It’s expensive for a decent sized dwelling, but again, not as much as larger metropolises.
If it weren’t for price, I’d say London: both places have good and friendly customer service, but London has even better walkability and transportation and doesn’t have the weather extremes that SLC does (which, itself, are less extreme than some other places in America).
Least livable: Houston. Hard to get around in and usually too hot and humid.
