[quote]I'm also surprised that no cities from Spain are listed at the site. I love going to Spain
To visit, who wouldn't rather visit Spanish cities than Swiss or Austrian or Danish or New Zealand cities or Canadian cities. There's always an element of the chaotic, of surprise, and delight. They're on their own clock. The food is strange and delicious, the men are handsome, the people are fun, you never need to go back to your hotel room because the parties never stop. They're also friendly and fun and love to drink; yet you very rarely see a drunk Spaniard who is even a little sloppy, let alone belligerent - it's bad form not to contribute to the conversation and sit there silent and sullen and sour.
But the measures of livability don't place .much value in fun or happiness or elements of surprise and delight, they measure things the German way, by counting the measurable: number of free museums, number of tram and bus and subway stops, number of job opportunities -- and what a waste time it is to spend your life in Spain working. They measure the number of day care spots and international schools and the number of different types of sports leagues. They measure the number of pieces of litter on a sidewalk, the.numbee of facilities for recycling cooking oil, the number of retirement living facilities, and the number of shops selling clothes for large women, and the number of flights to other cities from the airport. They measure the things that people will tout when your job transfers you to Vienna for a few years: the city is very clean and we'll connected to transportation hubs and has more square footage. The number of dry cleaners and show repairers and the salaries if school teachers, the air quality index...
All the things easily counted are counted in these livability indices, and somehow it all adds up to something boring. Vienna is a lovely city, as q place to live there is much logic and convenience to the place, but aside from the wild card of beautiful architecture, there's not enormous vibrancy. It's ability to delight is down to "oh, look at the capitals on those columns" (something I happen to be fan of, but...). Zurich? The surprise will come from the prices of doing anything and from the uptight neighbors and their rules...but the pretty bits are immaculately clean.
Livability indices measure things that can make for convenient, logical, clean, well organized, expensive, close to work cities, entirely pleasant to live on on a day to day basis, but not the cities that win anybody's heart or makes anybody want to move countries to live there.