}

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Auckland hits a five

Auckland has come out fifth best city in the world for quality of life, according to an annual ranking. It’s the same position as last year. Wellington was ranked 12th best. The survey looked at 215 cities and was conducted by Mercer Consulting, reportedly to help governments and major companies place employees on international assignments.

Interestingly, the top Australian city was Sydney, at 10th place. Sky News Australia ran a teaser declaring, “Sydney is the 10th best city in the world, according to a new survey,” completely ignoring the fact that Auckland was rated higher than any Australian city, and that Sydney was the only Australian city to rank higher than Wellington. Big surprise, I know. Still, Australian cities—highly competitive with each other—aren’t very happy about their rankings.

My old hometown of Chicago was at 44th-equal, along with Washington, DC, Osaka and Lisbon. Last year Chicago was also at 44th. New York City was 49th, and Los Angeles wasn’t in the top 50.

To be honest, I don’t really care that much about these rankings, though others clearly do. And, I’m not even sure how warranted any particular spot is. However, I’m just Kiwi enough to feel a little glee about Auckland rating higher than any Australian city.

2 comments:

d said...

Bah! I'd say Wellington should be higher than Auckland! ;)

Not too sure about that article - there is a typo in the first sentence, and the graph says Sydney is #19, even though it's in the #10 spot...

Arthur Schenck said...

I don't make the rankings, I just report them... but clearly they were right! ;-)

And Wellington was rated higher than all Australian cities apart from Sydney, and higher than all American cities. Mind you, Auckland was rated higher than any of those...