Melbourne Remains Most Liveable City in the World, Bloomberg.
I see Detroit is number 40. That’s the only one in the top 50 where you’d really go “explain?”
That said, is Cleveland (number 45) really better to live in than San Francisco?
Once you get below 50 you slip gradually down through eastern europe and the middle east until you get to pandemonium like Triploli, Harare etc.
Dublin just about beats Manchester and London anyway, that’s about all you can say. Paris and Berlin prove you can live in a massive European city and enjoy a good overall quality of life.
No way is Dhaka, Bangladesh, at number 139, ahead of Galway.
Nope. Crap survey.
(Not that I’ve ever been to Bangladesh…)
Like all such lists ranking very complex and multifaceted entities (cities, universities), this list makes no sense at all.
I’ve been told by someone who has been in both Dhaka and Galway that the driving styles are similar 
Dhaka is a city. Galway is a large village…hence scoring
Thats right. I was in Galway last year for the first time in over a decade.
Its tiny. Good pubs in its tiny town centre though.
Hmmn…so nine out of the top ten cities happen to be in British Commonwealth Countries. What does that tell us? Perhaps, that the British had a civilising influence on these former wild frontier countries - the positive effects of which are still being felt today?
(Interestingly, they also happen to be in the top destination countries for the current generation of Irish emigrants.)
And none of the top 50 are in your UK. What does that tell you.
That theory doesn’t hold water, HiFi. Out of the 17 bottom-ranking cities (the 17 are grouped together in the table for some reason, hence the random number), 7 were under British rule and 6 are in member-states of the British Commonwealth (Zimbabwe is suspended) - Nairobi, Lusaka, Port Moresby, Lagos, Harare, Karachi, Colombo. All 7 are in states that score poorly on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Damascus and Tehran are also in the lowest ranks, and Britain was heavily involved in Syrian and Iranian/Persian political affairs. This is not to single out Britain - 6 were under French rule, 7 if you include Syria.
I take your point but large chunks of Africa always seemed to be ungovernable anyway - probably more down to tribal and religous conflicts. And many of those you mention fared worse once they opted for independance electing tyrants like Mugabe etc. But it’s still remarkable that nine out of the top ten cities are British Commonwealth countries. Why is that? Is it because they’re mainly English speaking? is it down to the Legal systems they adopted? Christianity? Or perhaps it’s geographical - easy to control the borders of an island nation like New Zealand. Or in Candaa’s case, having just one border with a friendly nation.
I’d love to see a cost of living index with typical salaries for popular professions matched up to this survey. Cost of housing would be really interesting too. I am pretty sure that I can buy a house in Detroit for about a fiver.
(feverishly scouring internet for info)
Eh, is it something to do with cricket?
Not quite a fiver - but two weeks wages will get you something alright!
If only we had foreclosures in Dublin. Sigh.
We do, but NAMA is sitting on them all and selling them under the table to their own cronies! 
These are wierd rankings - I have been to both Lusaka and Colombo and they are both pretty attractive places - I can’t imagine that they are anywhere near as unpleasant as Lagos or Port Moresby or Karachi to live in. Harare struck me as a particularly nice place when I was there but that was 18 years ago and I guess it has changed depressing and dramatically for the worse since.
I think at this stage we can dismiss Hifi’s interesting theory about how black people ruin cities (do I have that right?). I suspect that the list is created by judging the cities with a large cultural bias. Much of the world would find living in a permissive western city to be hell on earth…
Perhaps there is a link between where the various cities rank in the ‘liveable’ table and where they are in their bubble/credit cycle? No doubt there would be an argument about cause/correlation, but if a city is rightly seen as an attractive place to live it probably causes irrational decisions to be made about how capital is spent, credit is created, and how risks are assessed. A city awash with optimism, credit and cash is a great place to live, - until it isn’t.
My 2 cents…