The world's top 100 cities

Resonance Consultancy recently released its new ranking of the World’s Best Cities for 2024. For the last nine consecutive years, they have ranked the 100 best cities in the world based on a comprehensive methodology by beginning with a large list of 270+ global cities, which they define as “principal cities of metropolitan areas with populations of more than one million.” With so much changing around the world over the past few years, many cities have drastically changed.

According to Resonance, the overall Best Cities rankings are determined by analyzing the performance of each city for a wide range of factors that have historically shown positive correlations with attracting employment, investment and/or visitors to cities. Resonance groups these 24 metrics into a city’s Livability, Lovability and Prosperity. Here are some of the factors that are included in each category:

• Livability: Includes how walkable and bike-friendly it is to how many quality parks, sights, neighborhoods and landmarks are recommended online by locals and visitors. They also look at key infrastructure and institutions such as the ranking of the city’s best university and the relative connectivity of its airport to other cities—factors that not only attract talent, but companies as well.
• Lovability: Speaks to the relative vibrancy and quality of place of a city relative to its competitive set. It looks at culture, sports, dining and nightlife, the more visitors, young professionals and large corporations it attracts. A city's lovability also inspires residents, businesses and visitors to promote a city to the world more than city marketers or chambers of commerce can ever hope to achieve. (e.g. attractions, Facebook check-ins, Google searches, TripAdvisor reviews, Instagram hashtags, Google Trends, etc.)
• Prosperity: Focus' more on the human capital side. Resonance measures both the educational attainment level of the city’s population and the percentage of people participating in the labor force. We not only include obvious indicators of prosperity such as GDP per capita, but also the poverty rate to evaluate how well that wealth is distributed among a city’s population.

OK so how did the rankings come out? Here is the full list and here are Top 10:

1. London
2. Paris
3. New York
4. Tokyo
5. Singapore
6. Dubai
7. San Francisco
8. Barcelona
9. Amsterdam
10. Seoul

So London tops the list, as well as taking the #1 spot in the Culture and Educational Attainment categories. London tops the overall Livability and Lovability indices, leading all global cities in the Instagram Hashtags, Facebook Check-ins and Tripadvisor Reviews subcategories. London also ranked third on the planet (and first in Europe) for cities with the biggest international traveler spend in 2022, with $16.07 billion, almost tied for second with Doha. (Dubai was the runaway winner.) And apparently, London is also continuing to transform, as noted in this recent Bloomberg article about The Radical Changes Coming to the City of London.

Go take a look at the full list of ranked cities to get more insight on where you're sending your talent!