Medium Cities Are the Best to Live In
There is apparently an ideal city size, which provides a balance between creativity, professional opportunities and the advantages of living in a place with a small population.
Humans come together in cities to ease our existential dynamics and to have access to useful services which range from healthcare to recreational and cultural activities. Cities are supposed to make our lives easier, although paradoxically, agglomeration seems to result in the opposite, it makes our everyday lives more complicated.
Due to the latter, some studies measure the ‘liveability’ of cities. This alludes to the favorable aspects that simplify and facilitate living our lives, a term used to describe living standards, which is usually measured by focusing on social standards like education, health and safety.
In a recent study, which analyzed how cities can make life easier for their inhabitants, medium cities occupied the top positions on the list, where social standards coexist alongside other aspects like population density, traffic and pollution. This is of course to be expected since, broadly speaking, the fewer inhabitants a city has, the less traffic there will be.
The most recent Global Liveability Ranking, showed that the ten best cities to live in were Melbourne-Australia, Vienna-Austria, Vancouver, Toronto and Calgary-Canada, Adelaide and Sidney-Australia, Helsinki-Finland, Perth-Australia and Auckland- Nueva Zealand, all of which are, by the way, considered medium sized cities.
These cities have healthy environmental indicators, efficient transport systems, good public services, high quality education and a cultural agenda as rich as any other great city. These are spaces that offer the greatest cosmopolitan advantages while they also lack great conflicts. In this sense, urban decentralisation and the growth of medium sized cities is a viable resource that will allow us to solve, for example, environmental issues. Medium cities are establishing themselves as the best ‘liveable’ option, a concept that is also transcendental in terms of leading a happy life.
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