TEHRAN — The city of Tehran is ranked first among the biggest improvers over the past years in terms of liveability, according to the Global Liveability Report 2017 published by the Intelligence Unit of The Economist.

The concept of liveability is simple: it assesses which locations around the world provide the best or the worst living conditions. Assessing liveability has a broad range of uses, from benchmarking perceptions of development levels to assigning a hardship allowance as part of expatriate relocation packages. 

Every city is assigned a rating of relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability; healthcare; culture and environment; education; and infrastructure. Each factor in a city is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. 

For qualitative indicators, a rating is awarded based on the judgment of in-house analysts and in-city contributors. For quantitative indicators, a rating is calculated based on the relative performance of a number of external data points. 

The scores are then compiled and weighted to provide a score of 1–100, where 1 is considered intolerable and 100 is considered ideal. The liveability rating is provided both as an overall score and as a score for each category. To provide points of reference, the score is also given for each category relative to New York and an overall position in the ranking of 140 cities is provided.

With 5 percent improvement in the past five years Tehran ranks 127 with overall rating of 50.8. Cities of Dubai, Abidjan, Harare, and Colombo are the four other biggest improvers respectively.

Five cities of Kiev, Damascus, Tripoli, Detroit, and Moscow are the five biggest decliners. 

The ten most liveable cities are Melbourne, Vienna, Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary, Adelaide, Perth, Auckland, Helsinki, and Hamburg with very close scores standing at 97.5 to 95.

On the other hand cities of Kiev, Douala, Harare, Karachi, Algiers, Port Moresby, Dhaka, Tripoli, Lagos and Damascus with an overall rating of 47.8 to 30.2 are the ten least liveable cities. 

MQ/MG