A popular ranking of cities is that of Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) which has just released its 2011 Liveability Ranking in the world. The top five cities are Vancouver, Melbourne, Vienna, Toronto and Calgary. Helsinki and Sydney occupy the sixth and seventh spots. Perth and Adelaide are ranked eighth with Auckland occupying the 10th spot.

Another well-known ranking is Mercer’s Quality of Living index. The top 10 liveable cities in 2010 are Vienna, Zurich, Geneva, Vancouver, Auckland, Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, Bern and Sydney.

The differences in the rankings are the result of different criteria used to measure the cities. For instance, in the EIU ranking, more than 30 qualitative and quantitative factors are taken into account. These include prevalence of crime, quality of public healthcare, level of corruption, level of censorship, availability of sporting facilities and quality of public transport.

These are grouped into five categories namely: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure with unequal weight. For instance, stability has a 25% weight while education has only 10%.

Cost of living is not a factor in the EIU ranking. For instance, in the healthcare category, cost of treatment is not taken into account. What is evaluated is the availability of service, both private and public.

City rankings by management consultancy firms are not to give awards to the cities or their mayors. They are done to enable multinational corporations to have standard measures to pay "hardship allowances" to their employees who are stationed in cities around the world. All things being equal, anyone in his or her right mind would prefer to work and bring up families in Vancouver or Vienna than in Dhaka or Harare, the bottom two cities out of 140 cities surveyed in the EIU ranking.

However, the rankings of EIU, Mercer and ECA International have been increasingly used to gauge the liveability and attractiveness of cities both as places to visit or for bringing up families. This may not be fair to many cities in Asia, Africa and South America since the methodologies are biased towards the welfare and tastes of expatriates from developed countries.

For instance, according to the ECA International rankings based on the views of Asian expatriates, Singapore has consistently been ranked the most liveable city in the world. In the 2010 ranking, both George Town and Kuala Lumpur are ranked 62nd together with Bangkok. Other Asean cities, such as Hanoi, Metro Manila and Jakarta are ranked 123, 142 and 191 respectively.

It is also interesting to note that in a recent study of liveability among the Australian capital cities conducted by the Property Council of Australia, Adelaide emerges as the most liveable city followed by Canberra and Melbourne. Sydney, which is ranked 10th in the world by Mercer in 2010, comes out last. It is ranked lower than Darwin.

There is little doubt that if the survey methodology is designed by Asians and for Asian multinational corporations, the rankings of cities might be different. As such, it is notable that the Centre for Liveable Cities, a think-tank supported by the Singapore government, is developing the methodology to rank the liveability of cities in the world.

At present, there is no liveability ranking of towns and cities in Malaysia. Apart from Kuala Lumpur, George Town and Johor Baru, the cities are too small to be in the list of international liveable city indexes.

The Housing and Local Government Ministry has a bi-annual star-rating exercise to rate the performance of local authorities and the findings are accessible in the ministry’s website. But as it is basically a study of governance, the results do not necessarily reflect the liveability of the towns and cities. Besides, many variables of liveability are not the responsibility of the local authorities.

It is timely to rank the liveability of major towns and cities in Malaysia. An element of competition among them can stimulate pride of place not only among the government officers, but also residents. More importantly, an annual or bi-annual study of liveability will provide concrete data on the strength and weakness of the towns and cities under study so that solutions and improvements can be worked out.

A project to rank the liveability of the towns and cities, anyone?

** Republished with permission. This article appeared in the March 1, 2011 issue of theSun. Datuk Dr Goh Ban Lee is a senior research fellow of Seri and interested in urban governance, housing and urban planning.