Melbourne Most Liveable City

It has become a bit predictable - but Melbourne has again been voted as the World’s most liveable city.

For the fifth year in a row, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has given Melbourne an almost perfect score in terms of liveability, with Austria’s Vienna, and Canada’s Vancouver filling the remaining spots on the podium.

Graded in terms of health care, education, transport, economic and social stability, environment and infrastructure, the EIU set out to review 140 cities world wide, marking each city evenly.

Of the 140 cities reviewed, 28 cities experienced a change in grade - with cities influenced by civil unrest or acts of terror or violence, sliding down the ranks - this included police unrest in some of the USA’s major cities.

Melbourne’s thriving education accessibility and quality ranked one of the highest, as well as its comparably excellent public and private health systems, took the fore for Melbourne.

Adelaide surprisingly squeezed out Sydney to make it into the top 5 - but unsurprisingly Australia and Canada were the dominating force in the total scoring.

Melbourne’s living and infrastructure, spurred on by the abundance of high-quality multi-residential living spaces pushed Melbourne in front of Austria by 0.1 points.

The EIU specified that liveability is strongly influenced by crime rates.

“Although crime rates are perceived as rising in Australia, the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is located, recorded just 82 homicide offences in 2013/14, a decrease of 11.8% from the previous year. In Austria the murder rate was just 0.9 per 100,000 people in 2012. In 2014 there were reports that only nine murders had been recorded in Vienna, a city of 1.8m people, a murder rate of 0.5 per 100,000 people.

“These figures compare with a global average of 6.2 homicides per 100,000 people (2013) and a US average of 4.5 per 100,000 (2013). New York boasted a rate of 3.9 in 2014, while Detroit reported a rate of 44 per 100,000 in the same year. In South Africa the rate was 32.2 in 2013/14."