Situated along Arabian Sea, the city is among world’s ‘least livable’

The EIU’s index focuses on evaluating the post-Covid recovery of cities worldwide, taking into account various factors such as stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Each city is given a score between 1 and 100, with 1 being considered intolerable and 100 being deemed ideal.

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With an overall score of 42.5, Karachi falls significantly short of the desired livability standards, DAWN reported. The city performed particularly poorly in the stability category, earning a meagre score of 20, indicating that little progress has been made in this area over the past year. Other scores include 50 for healthcare, 38.7 for culture and environment, 75 for education and 51.8 for infrastructure.

Karachi’s history on the EIU’s index has not been promising either. In 2019, the city ranked a dismal 136 out of 140 cities, and no report was published in 2020. In 2022, it only managed to climb to the 134th spot out of 140 cities.

In contrast, the majority of the top-ranked cities on the index hail from Western Europe and Canada. The capital city of Austria, Vienna, claimed the coveted first place for the second consecutive year, earning a perfect score of 100 in four out of the five indicators.

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At the same time, cities from Europe and the United States have experienced significant drops in the rankings, with two American cities, San Diego and Los Angeles, among the top ten fallers. Edinburgh, which made a respectable debut in our liveability survey last year at 35th position, has now plummeted to 58th.

Other cities in the UK have also fared poorly, with Manchester falling by 16 places and London dropping by 12. While these cities have not seen a sharp decline in their index scores, they have failed to make the progress that many other cities, particularly in Asia, have achieved over the past year.

Updated: 14 Jul 2023, 12:11 PM IST