Quality of Living Rankings for Cities

Mercer Quality of Living Survey 2014 - Top 5 and Bottom 5 Cities

North America

Europe

Interestingly enough, (based on this survey) I currently live in the highest ranked American city, San Francisco (coming in at 5th for North America, 27th overall), and have lived and spent extensive time in the 4th ranked city overall, Munich, Germany. I'm shocked that Copenhagen, Denmark did not make this survey's cut for top 5 European cities, although it is ranked #9 on the overall list for 2015. 

Source: Mercer

TED Talk: Amanda Burden, Cities, Public Spaces

Everything Amanda says in on point.

Start watching at 14:10

The New York High-line: an elevated railway running through 3 Manhattan neighborhoods that once carried trains but has been converted into a green public space.

"You know, it's true, commercial interests will always battle against public space. You might say, "How wonderful it is that more than four million people come from all over the world to visit the High Line." Well, a developer sees just one thing: customers. Hey, why not take out those plantings and have shops all along the High Line? Wouldn't that be terrific and won't it mean a lot more money for the city? Well no, it would not be terrific. It would be a mall, and not a park. (Applause) And you know what, it might mean more money for the city, but a city has to take the long view, the view for the common good." 

I love and firmly stand behind the general idea that an investment in public spaces for people and greenery should be valued over commercial or economic interests. When you make an investment in public spaces that positively contribute to peoples' health and well-being, you are making a higher impact and longer-term investment in that place as a whole. SOCIAL CAPITAL.

A Brief History of City Planning from Jan Gehl

1955-60

• Car Invasion 
• "The Brasilia Syndrome" - city planning from 5 meters above the ground 
• The people scale is completely neglected
• The Planners: planning from above and from a distance 
• The Architects: more and more focused on form 
• The Traffic Planners: making rooms for the traffic, making cars happy 
• Who is looking after the people and the city at eye level?
• The Human Dimension is essentially lost

2010: Fifty Years Later

• Wanted: Lively, attractive, safe, sustainable, healthy city
• How? Jan Gehl has some ideas

Cities for People: We must bring back the principles of planning at a Human Scale to make cities first and foremost a place for people once again.

Jan Gehl is a world-renowned architect, urban designer, and author - see more about his approach in lectures and videos here! He is a founding partner of Gehl Architects, an "Urban Quality Consulting" firm that focuses on creating cities for people; mutually beneficial relationships between people's quality of life and their built environment. Re-orienting city design towards pedestrians and cyclists to improve quality of life for people has been a focus of Gehl's career. He is (among all the other people I highlight in my blog) amazing and someone I would dream to work with! 

 Source

LBJ "The Great Society" Speech, 1964

Below I paraphrase my favorite quotes from Lyndon B Johnson's speech at the University of Michigan:

• The purpose of protecting the life of our nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a nation.
• For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
• The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
• But most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
• The three places where we begin to build the Great Society: in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms. Fifty years from now, there will be 400 million Americans, four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, and highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled.
• Aristotle said, "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today. 
• The catalog of ills is long, there is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs. There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our traffic.
  Open land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. 
• Worst of all, expansion is eroding the precious and time honored values of community with neighbors and communion with nature. The loss of these values breeds loneliness and boredom and indifference. 
• Our society will never be great until our cities are great. Today the frontier of imagination and innovation is inside those cities and not beyond their borders.
• New experiments are already going on. It will be the task of your generation to make the American city a place where future generations will come not only to live, but to live the good life.
• Will you join in the battle to build the Great Society, to prove that our material progress is only the foundation on which we will build a richer life of mind and spirit?
• There are those timid souls that say this battle cannot be won; that we are condemned to a soulless wealth. I do not agree. We have the power to shape the civilization that we want. But we need your will, and your labor, and your hearts, if we are to build that kind of society.
• Let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say, "It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life."

This speech was given 50 years ago. Take a look at the last half century. As a society, have we been moving towards and building upon such ideals that allow a positive culture to flourish?

Source: PBS