İstanbul ranks 122nd among 230 cities around the world in terms of quality of living according to the results of a global survey released on Tuesday.
According to Mercer’s 2016 Quality of Living survey, European cities dominate the rankings of locations with the best quality of living, while İstanbul ranks 122nd, unchanged from its ranking in 2015. In a recent survey by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), Turkey’s largest city İstanbul topped the list in three separate categories, including social life, access to infrastructure services, and income and wealth. The list was released in January. The city, however, came in 56th in education quality in the same survey.
Every year, Mercer, one of the world’s leading consultancy firms, releases its Quality of Living Index, which looks at which cities provide the best quality of life. The survey of 230 cities helps companies and organizations determine compensation and hardship allowances for international staff. It uses dozens of criteria such as political stability, health care, education, crime, recreation and transport.
Vienna, Austria’s grand capital on the Danube River, offers the highest quality of life of all cities in the world, while the Iraqi capital Baghdad, once more took its place at the bottom of Mercer’s livability list. Switzerland’s Zurich, New Zealand’s Auckland, Germany’s Munich and Canada’s Vancouver followed Vienna — which reached the best position for the seventh time in a row — in the top five of most pleasant cities to live in. Global centers London, Paris, Tokyo and New York City did not even make the top 30, lagging behind most big German, Scandinavian and Australian cities.
Baghdad was again ranked lowest in the world. Waves of sectarian violence have swept through the city since the American-led invasion in 2003. Damascus, five year’s into Syria’s bloody war, ranked six places above Baghdad.