June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

Chapter

WHAT MAKES A CITY MORE

LIVEABLE?

1.1 A MORE LIVEABLE LIFE

A life should be lived to the fullest. We do this to derive satisfaction from
our personal achievements and to feel fullled by our contributions to
the society. We also strive to live life to the fullest in order to honour
the deep desire of our parents that we lead happy and meaningful lives.
For most people, how to live life to the fullest is not independent of the
geographical location of where they live. For one thing, there are the strong
emotionally primal tugs on the heart by the hometown; and, for another,
the opportunities for professional advancement in some elds are better in
certain cities than in other cities. For example, competitive downhill skiing
is easier to pursue as a profession when one lives in Zurich rather than in
Paris or Shanghai.
The fact that a large proportion of the worlds population does not live
in the cities (or, even, in the countries) in which they were born reveals
conclusively the phenomenon of preferred habitat the existence of
places which people choose to migrate to. However, because there are
binding restrictions on the mass movement of people across national borders,
we cannot use the actual locations of residents to indicate the revealed
preferences of the worlds population for different cities.
The objective of this book is to introduce the Global Liveable Cities
Index (GLCI) which ranks the degree of liveability of the major cities in the
world. Our methodology of ranking liveability has several advantages over
other major methodologies used in ranking cities. The strengths of GLCI
include:

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

taking the perspective of an ordinary man living in that city;

modelling this ordinary person as having multi-dimensional sensibilities towards issues like economic well-being, social mobility,
personal security, political governance, environmental sustainability,
and aesthetics; and
including a large number of major cities in emerging economies in
order to get a diverse and more representative coverage of major cities
around the world.
The ordinary-residents-perspective approach of GLCI makes GLCI
substantially different from most other well-known liveability rankings of
cities like the Mercer Quality of Living Survey, and the Knight Frank Global
Cities Survey. The GLCI takes into explicit account a comprehensive list of
the everyday concerns of the ordinary household: the maintenance of law
and order, the availability of affordable healthcare, the average quality of
the public school system, the accessibility to tertiary level training, and the
adequacy of the mass transit infrastructure. In short, this book synthesizes
the results of earlier studies by others, and broadens their scope within an
encompassing theoretical framework that is implemented empirically.
Our ranking of the liveability of global cities is necessarily a workin-progress, even if it is arguably the best-in-its-class. There have been
some data limitations that we have not yet been able to overcome, and
this has forced us to work at this point with a sample of only 64 global
cities. In addition to working to expand the number of cities covered, we
are also working to improve our methodology by incorporating additional
dimensions of liveability into our theoretical framework, and by searching
for better proxies for the variables in the empirical framework. So, this book
is a progress report on a research program on the liveability of cities, and,
as such, it cannot yet make the claim of having computed the denitive
ranking of cities.
Furthermore, the realities of, one, that the global environmental conditions could change drastically sometimes; and, two, that city administrations
and national governments could move comprehensively to a new socioeconomic-political policy regime occasionally mean that any ranking of
cities on their liveability captures only their relative positions at a particular
point in time. For example, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

What Makes a City More Liveable?

b1411-ch01

has generated substantial resources that have allowed many Chinese cities
to build 21st Century infrastructure in transportation and to undertake
ambitious environmental restoration that would eventually improve the rank
of some Chinese cities signicantly. But for the moment, these projects
have not yet reached critical mass and hence have not improved liveability
in these cities substantially enough to boost their ranking. So the rank of a
city today is not necessarily a good indicator of its rank in the future.
As pointed out earlier, there are binding restrictions on international
migration that make free choice of the place of residency impossible for the
great majority of people in the world. It is hence natural to ask why the
liveability of cities is important to rank. The simplest answer to why we
should rank cities is because we can do so. This simplest answer should not
be mistaken for a simple-minded answer or a glib answer. This attitude of
we rank them because we can comes from at least basic human urges.
The rst primal urge is captured in the academic tradition of knowledgefor-knowledges-sake, the outcome of mans unbounded natural human
curiosity. The second primal urge behind the city ranking exercise is
part of the universal human desire to rank everything, which is why we
have the well-known Guinness Book of World Records, and the well-known
questions of who is the prettiest of them all?, and which is the most
competitive economy in the world? This second primal urge reects
something deep in the human psyche, the overwhelming human desire for
self-improvement.
There are, naturally, also more prosaic reasons for the growing popular
interest1 in the liveability of cities, and, hence, the increasing desire to rank
the liveability of cities. This heightened interest in the concept of liveability
is, in large part, the result of three developments of the last thirty years:
the acceleration of globalization;
the growing awareness of the requirements for sustainable development; and
the rapid appearance of megacities in the emerging world, notably in
Brazil, China, Mexico, India, and sub-Saharan Africa.
1 Examples of bestsellers on cities in the last two decades are Saskia Sassen (1991) and Edward Glaeser

(2011).

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

Globalization accelerated after the 19891992 period when the Berlin

Wall fell in November 1989, the Soviet Union imploded politically in
August 1991, India initiated the process of serious market-oriented reforms
in December 1991, and China abandoned the search for a Third Way in
economic system after Deng Xiaoping visited southern China in January
February 1992. The globally transformational nature of globalization can be
captured by the fact that the integration of the labour force of the former
Soviet empire, India and China into the world economic system meant that
the number of workers participating in the international division of labour
had risen from 1.1 billion in 1990 to 2.7 billion in 2000, an increase of 247
percent; (Woo, 2008, Table 3, pp. 74).
Globalization has meant the intensication of the cross-border mobility
not just of goods and nancial capital but also of labour and human talents.
And liveability is one key characteristic of cities that is able to attract a
disproportionate amount of the globally-mobile resources (such as talents,
high net worth individuals, investors, innovators, entrepreneurs, and capital)
that are recognized to make positive contributions to economic growth,
economic resilience, global political inuence, world agenda-setting power,
socio-cultural innovation, and international lifestyle impact.
Herein lies the heightened interest in the liveability of cities. The accelerated globalization has reinforced our understanding that the agglomeration
of activities by cities constitutes powerful growth engines. In the words of
Edward Glaeser (2011) cities magnify humanitys strength. Cities improve
their talents by providing competition, enable socio-economic mobility
by creating opportunities, and induce innovation by easing face-to-face
engagements. Density is good because the greater the number of people,
the greater the number of synergistic interactions.
The second recent development that has focused attention on liveability is the realization of the increasing scarcity of natural resources and
the continuing deterioration of the natural environment. There have been
many reminders that resources are scarce since Thomas Malthus (1798) and
the famous study by the Club of Rome in 1972;2 and that current resource
use and lifestyles will lead to disastrous effects for the world. Figure 1 depicts
the timeline of the planets exploitable resources facing depletion, based on
2 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jrgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III (1972).

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

What Makes a City More Liveable?

Figure 1 Projected Dates for the Exhaustion of Exploitable Natural Resources at 2007
Consumption Rates.
Source: Terre Sacree (2008).

Figure 2

Supply versus Demand for Raw Water.

Source: 2030 Water Resources Group Global Water Supply and Demand model, 2009.

2007 consumption rate. The world will run out of silver in 2020; lead in
2030; oil in 2050; gas in 2070; iron in 2090; cobalt in 2120, aluminium in
2140; and coal in 2155.
Water resources, too, are projected to be insufcient if the current
consumption rate is not reduced. Figure 2 shows the trajectories of the world
demand for water (in billion m3 ) and of the world supply of water (on the

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

assumption of the current 90%-reliable supply) under the business-as-usual

scenario. The historical productivity increases in water demand and water
supply will solve only 40 percent of the projected amounted shortage in
2010.
It is, thus, of no surprise that the concept of liveability is closely linked
with the concept of sustainability. Mike Douglass (2002) emphasizes that
liveability is a means to secure global investment and gain greater local
economic resilience because being more liveable and environmentally sound
will lead to lower impositions of costs on business. According to Vanessa
Timmer and Nola-Kate Seymoar (2006), a liveable city is also a city that
ghts against any waste of the natural resources that should be left intact for
the humankind, i.e., a liveable city is also a sustainable city. Using the same
logic, Peter Evans (2002) compares liveability to a coin with two faces
livelihood and ecological sustainability.
The third recent development that has focused attention on liveability
is the fast growth of cities in developing Asia, Latin America and Africa into
megacities. The United Nations (2010) estimates that the world population
will grow from 6.8 billion in 2010 to 8.3 billion in 2030; and that the
entire increase of 1.5 billion will take place in the urban areas, boosting
the proportion of world population residing in towns from 50 percent to
60 percent. Figure 3 shows the world population growth, in billions of
people, by region and by type of population from 2010 to 2030.
Given this coming surge in urbanization and the growth of megacities,
it is natural that many governments of the emerging world are eager to get
a better understanding of the challenges in formulating and implementing
urban planning policies to improve the liveability of their cities. In the
end, the task boils down to mobilizing management and technology to
support pragmatic and forward-looking policies to establish the necessary soft
infrastructure and hard infrastructure. The key lesson learnt from countries
with successful urbanization experiences is that while the government
takes the lead in providing public goods and services, they could do so
correctly and effectively only if the decision-making process was informed
by consultations with the residents, foreign experts on megacities, nongovernment organizations (NGOs), and the business community.

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

What Makes a City More Liveable?

9
+0.36

+0.81

+0.12

+0.07

+0.04

+0.08

0.02

0.01

0.05

+0.01

8.3

+0.15

6.8
0.09

4.9
3.4

Urban
population

3.4

Rural
population

3.4

0
Total
Asia Pacific
populatoin
2010

Africa

Latin
America

North
America

Europe Middle-East

Total
population
2030

Figure 3 World Population Growth by Region and by Type of Population, 20102030.

Source: United Nations.

1.2 THINKING BROADLY ABOUT THE CONCEPT

OF LIVEABILITY
To be clear about what constitutes liveability, one must rst be clear about
what is human nature. This is because the more a lifestyle is in accordance
with human nature, the more liveable is the life. We can view each of
the elds in the social sciences and humanities as dealing with one aspect
of mans nature; and either as pointing out the implications from that
aspect or as catering to that aspect. Economics uses mans quest for material
improvement to explain the working of markets; political science employs
mans quest for power and domination over others to clarify the working of
bureaucracies; and sociology exploits mans quest for recognition and status

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

to elucidate organizational dynamics. And, for art, literature, and music, each
addresses a part of mans needs for aesthetics. So, as a rst approximation,
one could say that human nature is a creative combination of Sense and
Sensibility. Scholars throughout history have sought through the social
sciences to make sense of the human world by constructing models based on
various characteristics of human nature; and scholars have sought through
the humanities to full the sensibilities of the human spirit by undertaking
critical reection on art, culture, and nature.3
The above description of human nature is, of course, very inadequate
because human nature is far too complex to be divided into distinct components for study in the way that knowledge has now been compartmentalized
into different academic disciplines. The fact is that even the demarcation
of disciplines is many times a blurry one, and that there is substantial
overlap amongst some of them. More fundamentally, some disciplines
like Philosophy and Ecology simply defy the standard classications. For
example, the inquiry of Philosophy ranges from understanding the origins of
the observed phenomena to deciding the moral positions one should adopt
towards those phenomena.
The point is that, because human nature is complex, the concept of
liveability is necessarily a complex one. At the very least, the lesson is that
the concept of liveability has to be multi-dimensional in the same way
that human nature is. This is, perhaps, why we have so many well-known
distinct characterizations of human nature (e.g., man does not live by bread
alone and man is a social animal); and so many well-known diverse
expressions about human sentiments (e.g., an unexamined life is not worth
living for a human being and the best is yet to be).
For our study to rank the liveability of cities, we will try to capture
the multi-dimensional character of liveability by using ve themes to
operationalize the measurement of liveability. These ve themes have their
theoretical basis in the social sciences, humanities and natural philosophy;
and they have their empirical validation in the policies of outstanding
political leaders.
Specically, we posit that the degree of liveability depends on:
1. the degree of satisfaction with the freedom from want;
3 This denition of aesthetics is from Michael Kelley (1998).

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

What Makes a City More Liveable?

b1411-ch01

2. the degree of satisfaction with the state of the natural environment and
its management
3. the degree of satisfaction with the freedom from fear;
4. the degree of satisfaction with the socio-cultural conditions; and
5. the degree of satisfaction with public governance.
We must emphasize that the above sequence of the ve themes is not
in order of perceived priority. The ordering is not indicative of the relative
importance of each theme.
Theme 1: Satisfaction with the freedom from want. The term freedom from
want is from the 1941 speech by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt
who identied four kinds of freedom as the inherent rights of people.4
Freedom from want captures the right to a decent livelihood. More
broadly, this theme emphasizes peoples craving for creature comforts
(material abundance). The degree that this craving is satised is, in large part,
determined by the income level and the growth rate of income: two issues
that are central to the eld of economics.
Theme 2: Satisfaction with the state of the natural environment and its management.
This theme captures not only the desire of people for responsible stewardship
of the environment for the welfare of future generations but also the aesthetic
appreciation of nature by people. Furthermore, biological survival of the
human species requires that the selsh gene in the human species restrains
itself adequately because of its understanding of systemic sustainability (the
inter-connectedness of life across species).
Theme 3: Satisfaction with the freedom from fear. This theme captures the natural
right of people to live in safety through the maintenance of law and order,
the alleviation of natural disasters, and the prevention of wars by the state.
The absence of such psychological pressures in a city increases its liveability
in the same way that an improvement in the economic prospects of a city
increases its liveability.
Theme 4: Satisfaction with the socio-cultural conditions. For a city, this theme
stresses (a) the social comfort of living there (e.g., degree of income
4 The four freedoms are: freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom to worship, and freedom to

speak.

June 19, 2012

13:32

10

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

inequality, social harmony, and social mobility); (b) the physical ease of
living there (e.g., adequacy of mass transit, healthcare, and education); and
(c) the cultural richness of living there (e.g., amount of social diversity,
acceptance of different religious beliefs, and access to museums and cultural
performances). This theme subsumes Franklin Roosevelts third natural
right, the freedom to worship.
Theme 5: Satisfaction with public governance. This theme covers the effectiveness
of the government in providing public services (e.g., extent of corruption
and quality of judiciary system); the responsiveness of the government (e.g.,
degree of transparency and accountability); and the openness to political
participation (e.g., existence of organized opposition, and regular elections
that are free and fair). This theme subsumes Franklin Roosevelts fourth
natural right, the freedom to speak.
The above ve themes give us a conceptual framework of liveability
that is in accordance with the various depictions of the nature of man in the
social sciences, and the humanities:
1. man as an economic animal;
2. man as an animal that is sentient of aesthetics, the inter-dependence
of species, and stewardship of the natural environment and cultural
heritage for the future generations,
3. man as a survivor;
4. man as a socio-cultural animal; and
5. man as a political animal.
As many of the readers of this book have at least some familiarity with the
literature on city ranking, we will adopt a terminology for our ve themes
that is closer to the terms used by the major studies on the topic. In the
tables that we report, and in most of the discussion in the coming chapters,
we will:
1. use Economic Vibrancy and Competitiveness and Freedom from
Want interchangeably;
2. use Environmental Friendliness and Sustainability and The State
of the Natural Environment and Its Management interchangeably;
3. use Domestic Security and Stability and Freedom from Fear
interchangeably;

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

What Makes a City More Liveable?

11

4. use Socio-Cultural Conditions in the sense we have dened above;

5. Public Governance in the sense we have dened above.

1.3 THINKING SENSIBLY ABOUT THE CONCEPT

OF SUSTAINABILITY
As already stated, we are in total agreement with the viewpoint that
ecological sustainability is an integral component of liveability. And, because
of the fundamental importance of ecological sustainability in the concept
of liveability, we want to take up immediately here in the rst chapter of
this book an important issue that differentiates our worldview from the
worldviews of many other studies that rank cities or countries. The dening
issue that divides us from many others is about how to measure ecological
sustainability at the city level and at the country-level.
Our analysis takes the viewpoint that sustainability at the city level should
be measured by the extent that a city implements the principle of think
globally and act locally. Specically, our analytical position is that, in an
interdependent world of nation states, there are two components in the
correct conception of ecological sustainability:
ecological sustainability always means ecological sustainability at the
global level; and
ecological sustainability at the local level should not always be equated
with local self-sufciency in meeting the needs of the local community.
The rst component tells us to think globally. The second component
tells us to act locally in a way that is consistent with maximum global
welfare because if the local action is not consistent with the global optimum,
then the whole world is made worse off. To see the saliency of the second
component, consider the recent study conducted by the Fisheries Centre at
the University of British Columbia (UBC, 2012) which computed an Eco2
Index to aggregate the economic decit and the ecological decit of a
country. The ecological decit measures resource consumption and waste
produced by a country in comparison to its carrying capacity as expressed
in locally available resources such as agricultural land and energy.
The primary problem with this UBC index is that a country like the
United Kingdom that imports most of its food would thus have a bad

June 19, 2012

13:32

12

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

score on its ecological sustainability performance, while a food exporter

like Burma would have a high score on ecological sustainability. Physically
small countries (and city states in particular), like Bermuda, Curacao,
Malta, Singapore and Switzerland, that have gotten rich through active
participation in international trade are hence by denition ecologically
un-sustainable. Herein lies the fatal aw of this UBC index: the Eco2
Index holds that self-sufciency is a desired condition in and of itself.
Such a viewpoint is fundamentally a survivalist creed: todays friend can be
tomorrows enemy and so a city should never be reliant on the possible
ckleness of others.
In short, the Eco2 Index would identify the best world economic order
to be an autarkic world order. Furthermore, since a city normally relies on
the countryside for food, the application of the Eco2 Index at the city-level
would yield the conclusion that the best national economic system would
be a nation of self-subsistence farmers!
We explicitly reject the survivalist philosophy that the potential for selfsufciency in food and energy production is the appropriate measure of the
sustainability of a city or country. This survivalist mentality is at odds with
the insights of Adam Smith and David Ricardo who identify specialization
in production as the basis for wealth creation in normal times. It is only
during abnormal times (like the periods of worldwide conicts) where there
is virtual suspension of international trade is the survivalist criteria the correct
indicator for sustainability. But we are not interested in doing a ranking of
liveability that applies only during abnormal times when autarky is externally
imposed. The kind of country or city ranking studies that is exemplied
by the report of the Fisheries Centre of the University of British Columbia
(2012) should more properly be called rankings of survival-bility or,
simply, rankings of self-sufciency. In our thinking, however, living life
to the fullest is meaningful only if life is more than mere survival.
The survivalist interpretation of sustainability is really unsuited to the
modern world. If drastic climate changes were to occur abruptly in the
food-exporting parts of the world and trigger protectionism, a nation
of subsistence farmers would, indeed, escape largely unscathed from the
meltdown of the world food market. However, this autarkic nation would
still not survive a global nuclear armageddon like the one depicted so
graphically in the novel On the Beach by Nevil Shute (1957). The present
reality is that the practice of self-sufciency could not guarantee survival

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

What Makes a City More Liveable?

b1411-ch01

13

in a world with nuclear arms. So if we update the survivalist philosophy

to present circumstances, the Eco2 Index should measure sustainability of a
country by, one, the amount of effort that countrys government puts into
the campaign for a global ban on nuclear weapons; and, two, by how far the
country is from the closest country with nuclear arms (because this closest
nuclear-armed country has a higher probability of being a rst-strike target
by other nuclear-armed countries).
We like to propose that ecological sustainability is better guaranteed by
the practice of think globally, and act locally. We make this point by
considering the case of the emission of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) like CO2
by a country. It is clear that the best contribution that a country could make
to the global situation (from thinking globally) is to minimise its annual
emission of GHG, which we denote as G, measured in parts per million
(ppm) per year.
Now, what is to be done locally in order to reduce G (or, at least, keep
the growth rate of G at a minimum)? The value of G, the additional amount
of GHG in the air each year, is determined by the PIES-in-the-sky equation:
G = PIES
where
P = population size,
I = income per capita, i.e., GDP/P
E = energy inefciency dened as amount of energy (in Joules, J)
consumed in producing a unit of GDP, i.e., J/GDP
S = soiling capacity of the energy used dened as amount of GHG
added by each unit of energy consumed, i.e., G/J.
So we have:
G = P (GDP/P) (J/GDP) (G/J)
or
G = P (GDP/P) (G/GDP)
For the government of an emerging economy, responsible global
citizenship would have it to enact policies that would lower (J/GDP), (G/J)
and P, i.e., increase energy efciency, switch to green energy, and strengthen
the family planning program. As the average income (I) of an emerging

June 19, 2012

13:32

14

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

economy is still way below the levels in Western Europe and North America,
the obligation of the government to its own citizens is to continue to let
output (I) grow as fast as conditions permit. The faster the output grows, the
more the government should do to reduce energy inefciency (E), the use
of dirty energy (S) and the rate of population growth (P). In short, the policy
target that ows naturally from responsible global citizenship (thinking
globally and acting locally) and from the right of countries (especially of
the poorer countries) to grow is the emission-GDP ratio (G/GDP) rather
than the per capita amount of emission (G/P).5
The policy agenda that follows from the survivalist interpretation of
sustainability differs signicantly from our above policy agenda. It seems
straightforward that the implementation of self-sufciency in food and
energy would reduce the growth of GHG emission by reducing the growth
of output (I) because output is creased by international trade. However,
this GHG-reduction outcome from switching to a self-sufciency regime is
far from certain. In the cases of China and India, energy sufciency would
require these two countries to switch from imported oil to domestic coal,
and to generate more hydropower by building more Three Gorges Damtype of projects.6 This means that the only way that India and China could
attain energy sufciency without emitting even more GHG and tearing up
more of their natural environments would be if there were revolutionary
technological breakthroughs in solar power, wind power, and carboncapture-and-sequestration. Such technological breakthroughs are, however,
just as likely to occur under the think globally, and act locally policy
regime as under the self-sufciency policy regime.
Of course, the actual measure of Environmental Friendliness and Sustainability (The State of the Natural Environment and Its Management)
used in constructing our Global Liveable Cities Index (GLCI) takes many
more factors into consideration and not just the value of (GHG/GDP).
There should be no confusion that the above discussion on GHG is meant to
illustrate the basic differences in philosophy that guide the measurement of
ecological sustainability in our GLCI study and some major studies, e.g., the

5 This is why one measure of a countrys efforts to increase sustainability that we use in the empirical is

(G/GDP) rather than the commonly-used G or (G/P).

6 The reader interested in the environmental challenges of China could nd a brief review in Woo (2007).

June 19, 2012

13:32

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

What Makes a City More Liveable?

b1411-ch01

15

global-citizen approach versus the survivalist approach. As detailed later, our

measure of Environmental Friendliness and Sustainability is constructed
from 15 environmental sustainability indicators at the city level; and these
15 indicators could be grouped under three categories:
1. extent of air and water pollution
2. extent of depletion of natural resources
3. extent of government involvement in efforts to protect the environment

1.4 PREVIEW
The Global Liveable Cities Index (GLCI) is constructed by aggregating
over the ve dimensions of liveability (freedom from want, the state of the
natural environment and its management, freedom from fear, socio-cultural
conditions, and public governance). A total of 85 indicators were used, and
64 major cities were ranked.
The top ten cities in the GLCI ranking are (1) Geneva; (2) Zurich;
(3) Singapore; (4) Copenhagen and Helsinki (tied); (6) Luxembourg;
(7) Stockholm; (8) Berlin; (9) Hong Kong; (10) Auckland and Melbourne
(tied). And, the bottom ten cities in the GLCI ranking are (55) Ahmedabad;
(56) Pane; (57) Bangalore; (58) Chennai; (59) Delhi; (60) Mumbai;
(61) Manila; (62) Moscow; (63) Sao Paulo; (64) Jakarta.7
Seven of the ten most liveable cities are in Europe, two in Asia, and two
in Oceania. If we extend the list to the 20 most liveable cities, then 9 are in
Europe, 3 in Oceania, 5 in Asia, and 4 in North America.
We agree that there are many deciencies in summing up all aspects of
a city by a single number. However, the simplicity and ease of communications in using a single number to convey to the residents of a city about
the seriousness of the citys problems might justify its use. The examination
7 Jakarta has the lowest ranking because it is particularly decient in the environmental friendliness

and sustainability and socio-cultural conditions categories (it is ranked last in both). The Indonesian
government has under-invested in infrastructure for the poor, especially during the long reign of the
Soeharto government when Indonesia was receiving high oil revenue. For example, the proportion of
the population with access to improved sanitation facilities in Indonesia has gone up minimally, from
51% in 1990 to 52% in 2006, compared to the rise in the Philippines from 58% to 78% over the same
period (Woo, 2010, pp. 42). The proportion of the urban population in Indonesia that had (a) access to
improved sanitation facilities fell from 73% in 1990 to 67% in 2006; and (b) access to improved water
source fell from 92% to 89%.

June 19, 2012

13:32

16

9in x 6in

Ranking the Liveability of the Worlds Major Cities

b1411-ch01

RANKING THE LIVEABILITY OF THE WORLDS MAJOR CITIES

of the ve dimensions of the GLCI provides a yardstick for policy makers to

make cross-city comparisons and, hence, able to identify quickly the aspects
of liveability that need improvement through new policy initiatives. The
outcome is that the cities which achieve high liveability rankings will serve
as a source of motivation for cities that are lagging behind. Furthermore,
given the uidity of nancial and human capital, the GLCI can also be used
as a city-marketing tool to inform investors and talented professionals on
their selection of habitat.
The rest of the book is structured as follows.
Chapter 2
1. presents a comparison of the main methodologies that have been commonly applied to rank countries and cities in various dimensions like
economic competitiveness, global political inuence, and luxurious
living;
2. develops the methodology underlying the GLCI ranking
3. selects the data that are used to compute the GLCI ranking;
4. presents the computation algorithm; and
5. conducts a policy simulation exercise.
In addition, problems in the implementation of the framework and the
treatment of unavailable data are discussed.
Chapter 3 reports the ranking of the GLCI ranking and of the ve
components of GLCI.
Chapter 4 focuses on the efforts to improve liveability in the city-states of
Hong Kong and Singapore. It discusses their efforts at product differentiation
because of their locations in different neighbourhoods. The geo-economics
and geo-politics of Hong Kong and Singapore are facts rather than choices,
and their policy options are many times restricted to balancing trade-off
among the different elements in their objectives.
Chapter 5 compares the GLCI ranking with a number of major studies
on city ranking to identify the strengths of GLCI. It also offers practical
recommendations to low ranking cities and how to improve their liveability.