Singapore Ranks 31st in the World for Livability, even behind Kuala Lumpur - MORI

The Global Power City Index, published by the Mori Memoral Foundation, is a fascinating piece of work.  London was rated the top city, by quite a wide margin.  New York was in second place and Singapore was in fifth place - not bad for our little island state.

However, a closer look at the methodology and detailed rankings within the sub-categories reveal a very interesting picture.  The focus of this post is to point out that Singapore does not fare well in the 'Resident' category, or the category for livability, coming in at 31st.

Take a look at this chart for the ranking method used by the survey.  In short, they split into 6 sub-categories, namely Economy, Research and Development, Cultural Interaction, Livability, Environment and Accessibility.

They create five types of people, namely 'Manager', 'Researcher', 'Artist', 'Visitor' and 'Resident'. These five types are assumed to have certain demands with regard to what they want.  For example,  a Resident would want good access to products, ease of living, good education, leisure, public safety and quality of medical treatment.

These are the detailed scores from the six categories. Let's take a look at where Singapore stand.

Singapore's Ranking 
Economy - 6th
R&D - 8th
Cultural Interaction - 4th
Livability - 37th
Environment - 5th
Accessibility - 8th
Overall - Singapore was ranked 5th.

Why did Singapore do so poorly in Livability?
I think that this is an important question that the country should consider.  It is worthwhile to note that the top 2 global cities also did not fare well here.  London was ranked 21st and New York ranked 29th.   However, Paris was ranked 3rd in this category.

Singapore is a Small City State 
Unlike the cities of London and New York, Singapore has no hinterland.  We are a small city state. Therefore, it is even more urgent for Singapore to pay attention to the 'Livability' element because it impacts Singaporeans on a daily basis.

The challenge for us is whether we can continue to maintain our strength in the Economy and other categories, while drastically improve our Livability score.  Tokyo is also a very dense and crowded city, yet she is ranked significantly higher than Singapore, at 17 instead of 37.  Even Shanghai is ranked at 19.

Happy reading.