lol uk got pwnt on that chart

Quote:Original post by maximAL
what were the criteria for a city to actually be considered for the list?

Quote:What foreign postings are most coveted by expatriate executives? To find out, Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which provides advice to multinational companies on international assignments, has come up with a global ranking of the world's most livable cities based on 39 key quality-of-life issues. They include political stability, currency-exchange regulations, political and media censorship, school quality, housing, the environment and public safety.

Having lived in both Switzerland and Vancouver i'm not at all surprised that they are at the top of the list - awesome places to live.

Quote:Original post by capn_midnight
Basically, this is a list of places where money can shield you from the riff-raff, even if the riff-raff is still there.

Exactly how I felt when I visited Hollywood. Down the street and around the corner from their prized "Hollywood Walk of Fame" and you'd swear you are in a different part of town.

Out of the Australian cities, I'd have ranked Melbourne (num. 17) higher than Sydney (num. 9) - however I am a native born Melburnian and so naturally biased (plus I've only spent considerable time living in Melbourne and Canberra). My general impression is that Sydney life is a bit more tightly strung than Melbourne, as well as being the most expensive city in Australia. I don't think they factored in the cost of living into the table; Sydney is wonderful if you can live on the bay but it costs an absolute fortune to do so.

Regarding Canberra (unranked, probably not considered) while it's not the most glamorous city to visit, I find Canberra to be a nice place to live. It's got the benefits of being somewhere between a town and a city combined with the perks of being the capital. It's nice to live in a place where it takes less than twenty minutes to drive into the city centre even from the outskirts rather than an hour and a half.

Quote:Original post by Salsa

Quote:Original post by zedz
auckland num5 WTF its a shithole (ive been to all in the top10, the swiss + sydney + perhaps vancouver (if theyll relax the drinking laws), also dusseldorf ild rate as nice)

Could you elaborate more on this? I'm pretty curious, as Auckland looked fairly nice in photographs.

( i have lived there for 1 year + grew up (first 15years of my life) in a town ~60km away )

-theres not much spirit there
-mountains (snow) are a long drive away
-parts of it are very depressing + violent ( yes i know a lot of ppl would say this about a lot of cities but trust me, parts of auckland are different )
-its the second largest city WRT area in the world yet only has 1.3 million ppl, everyone drives (public transport is nonexistant), when i lived in auckland, it used to take me 1.5hours to travel into the center each morning to goto work
-weathers not so great (not cold enuf in winter + summer nights are to humid)

met a backpacker guy about a year ago, he was telling me a funny story, he arrived in auckland, met someone at the airport who invited him back to his place to smoke some dope, which he did, + then got beaten up + backpack nicked, he ran out the door stoned, 15 minutes later he got beaten up on the street by someone else for no reason (perhaps looking at them the wrong way), later that evening got wacked by a police baton, cause they thought he was taking part in a demonstration :)

unlike a lot of kiwi's (esp here in the south island) im certainly not anti auckland ppl, but i admit its a bit of a shithole, theres heaps of better places to live in nz than there, its like today walking to work, the sun shining (like it does often here in nelson since its the sunniest city in nz), in the most popular beach there were maybe 100ppl on it (+ its school holidays at the moment), the same beach in auckland would be packed. i could driver 15kms to rabbit island (which has a ~10km long + very wide beach + there would be noone, bliss)

i rate sydney better than melbourne
in fact ild rate them in this order sydney,adelaide,perth,brisbane,melbourne

Quote:Original post by CTar

Quote:Original post by necromancer_df
Position 215 is baghdad. I may not be up to date on my current affairs but I was under the impression it's not a great place to be, what with daily gunfights and road side bombings etc... apart from that I'm sure it's a great place!

Quote:Mercer collected the data between September and November of 2006 and considered 215 cities around the globe.

You do realize it's the lowest ranked city considered right? Its index is even less than half of number 214's index. That means they don't consider it a great place to be either. Not all cities are considered (I live in a town with a population of 16k and would be surprised to find my town in the table).

Yes, I realise that, just find it strange that it would be considered in a listing of most livable cities. I wonder how they picked which cities to rate.