ABSTRACT

As global livability rankings gain press attention and powerful influence with policy makers, we need an expanded critical debate on their context and problems. This essay narrates a brief history of three influential global livability rankings and critiques several major flaws in their criteria. We demonstrate how both Mercer and EIU’s business model dictates an artificial split between livability and the cost of living that has permeated current popular conceptualisations of livability, and focus on the lack of housing affordability as a ranking criterion. This essay evaluates top-ranked cities against perceptive and quantitative measures of housing cost, and shows how many of these cities share extremely high housing cost burdens. A just city should provide housing opportunities for all residents, not just the global elite for whom livability rankings were initially designed. Livability rankings, as currently conceptualised, distract from that goal.

摘要

随着全球宜居性排名越来越受到媒体的关注和对决策者的强大影响，我们需要就他们的背景和问题展开更多的批判性辩论。本文简要介绍了三个有影响力的全球宜居性排名的历史，并对其标准中的几个主要缺陷进行了批评。我们展示了美世和EIU的商业模式是如何在宜居性和生活成本之间进行人为划分的，这种划分已经渗透到当前流行的宜居性概念中，并着眼于缺乏住房可负担性作为排名标准。本文通过对住房成本的感知和定量评估来评估排名靠前的城市，并显示其中有多少城市承担着非常高的住房成本负担。公正的城市应该为所有居民提供住房机会，不仅是最初为他们设计宜居性排名的全球精英。从目前的概念上讲，宜居性排名会偏离目标。