Strange...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-14716442

Why strange? I've heard they're both full of rude, anally retentive locals and obnoxious indignant ex-pats. Not to mention over-zealous and aggressive ticket inspectors.

I blame the Muslims.( and don't even get me started on the Roma )

I'm sure if you ever visited Zurich, you could prove your point

Seriously, why strange?

Vancity, TO, Calgary?

meh--I'll wait a few months for the next such report and perhaps I can come up with a better comment.

Because these cities frequently populate the top 10 quality of living surveys ?

Which is not quite the same as Liveable though, is it?

Maybe with the fall of the $US to the Chuff it has skewed the affordability from really bad to just plain obscene.(8 Us dollars for a Big Mac over here).

I'm happy for you to explain the difference. Can one exist without the other ? How can a City be liveable and yet not offer quality of living and vice versa. How do you separate these two ?

Just because a city has a great Quality of Living index, doesn't necessarily mean you'd actually want to live there (assuming that's what "Liveable" means). Personally, I'd hate to live in either city. It's entirely subjective and dependant on personal experience.

As I've endlessly discussed this on the EF. The Mercer studies are bogus and don't reflect the real quality of life.

I think the problem here is that these studies are not even meant to reflect the quality of life, but the clueless journalists report them as if they would. AFAIK, they are supposed to provide an estimate of how much of the working potential of a (foreign) worker can be expected to be spent towards the working duties, versus how large a percentage will be spent sitting in traffic jams/waiting at home for plumbers that never arrive/reporting break-ins to the police/going bonkers since there is nothing to do except get wasted.

Liveability indexes are a measure of how smoothly everyday things will happen for a reasonable price. Not a measure of whether living the life will take your breath away.

cant argue with melbourne.. seems to revolve around sport and gambling or the two combined.

Great place

nonsense, all statistics can be ed and I have never been to such an ugly place that is way overprized with nasty people like Zurich, but that is my personal view

hehehe Cannucks:

I got in one little riot and my mom got scared, she said you're moving with your auntie and uncle to Melbourne.

Strange indeed! Melbourne is the capital of "fruit salad weather" ...it is definitely overpopulated with anti-histamines. I guess the poor locals who travel the non airconditioned salmon packed MET were not invited to vote on this? As for crime....nowadays no city can really insulate itself from this... but, after living on the fringe of the CBD for 10 years crime is a huge problem, espcially because of the drugies...yet, this somewhat weighs out when you compare greater Victoria ' a stone throw away' along with Melbourne's sporting events.....this result is a SHOCKER!

Mate, Im going to tell you right now by looking at that list one of the criteria had to of been "Child Friendly". All these Aussie cities are great for kids, prams, families, and changing tables. Same with Vancouver.

When you come back to CH from Oz you feel like its impossible to live comfortably. Swiss cities are not child friendly compared to these cities on the list.

So have they finally included "allowed to do laundry on a Sunday" as a criterion in these surveys?

A) if they were aware of the fact that you in Zurich are allowed to do laundry on Sunday, Zurich in their statistics would jump UP
B) BUT they most likely got note that Zurich is home to UBS and CS, and jumped to conclusions