The Happy City Index, the index that measures the happiness of cities, has spoken and has been clear : Barcelona is one of the cities unhappiest on your list. This ranking, prepared by the Institute for Quality of Life, compiles a list of 250 cities around the world and ranks them according to their level of happiness.
This time the first place went to Aarchus in Denmark, the “happiest city in the world” according to this list, with 1749.2 points. It was followed by Zurich, Switzerland, in second place, and Berlin, Germany, in third place. And Barcelona, which also appears on the list, has fallen far behind these three.
what is Happy City Index?
The Happy City Index is a list compiled by the Institute for Quality of Life, a center in England that conducts research on quality of life issues. Monitors, analyzes and studies areas related to community decision making, social policy making, implementation of public services and effectiveness in responding to new challenges and crises that accompany developing communities.
Here are cities whose activity can be measured on the basis of objective, transparent and verifiable data or which show special achievements in terms of quality of life. On the other hand, cities that do not appear All cities with a small population or for which living conditions cannot be assessed, the available data are not objective or are missing were excluded from the analysis
The scores for this list are compiled by scoring five main criteria: Citizenship (which studies topics such as educational system or social inclusion), Economy (GDP or unemployment), Governance (transparency or accessibility to poliitic), environment (anti-pollution policies or waste management) and mobility (transport efficiency or transport safety).
Barcelona, far behind in the list
Editorial credit: PBMfoto / Shutterstock.com
Following these criteria, the list is divided into three categories, gold, silver and bronze, which rank the happiness of the cities. The 38 first places are for gold, headed by the cities mentioned above and where other cities such as Helsinki, Amsterdam or Bristol appear. In the silver category, from 38th to 100th place, the podium is made up of Boston (USA), Odense (Denmark) and Oslo (Norway),
The capital of Catalonia has not fared so well in this list. Barcelona appears in the bronze category (positions 100 to 250), in 139th place out of 250, in the last Bloc of the list, with 1412.1 points. Its highest score of the five parameters is that of Economy, with 295.9 points, which means that topics such as GDP, Innovation and creativity of companies, Flexibility of the labor market and unemployment or Internationalization of companies score well.
On the other hand, has the lowest score of all Environment with 248.4 points, in a category that measures issues such as management of natural resources and renewable energies, anti-pollution policies, waste management and recycling, and the availability of green areas.
The bronze section is headed by Linz (Austria), Asan (South Korea) and Duseldorf (Germany). The other Spanish cities that appear on the list are Vigo (58th) and Bilbao (59th) are the best positioned Spanish cities, but in the bronze category are also Valencia (106th), Zaragoza (165th), Madrid (192nd), Málaga (216th) and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (242nd).
You can consult the complete list of the index in its web.