Vancouver, Most Livable City

Is the continual “most livable” title going to give Vancouver a Miss Congeniality complex?

Vancouver, 125 years young, is the envy of the world. But is 
being “most livable” all it’s cracked up to be?

For the fifth straight year Vancouver has been ranked number one on the annual list of Most Livable Cities published by the Economist magazine. If only NHL supremacy were so routine. We’re the perennial powerhouse – the New York Yankees of the Livable Cities League. 


Or are we really just Miss Congeniality? Imagine being named Miss Congeniality five pageants in a row. Miss Congeniality would end up stabbing Miss Universe with a nail file, still smiling as she shoved that tiara down her throat.


Most Livable is a lovely award. But it’s not the same as Most Interesting. Different list. The two aren’t hard to tell apart – one usually has Vancouver, Melbourne and Zurich, while the other one has Rome, Paris and New York. Vancouver hasn’t been New York since The X-Files left town. When an actor says, “I’m not a doctor but I’ve played one on TV,” you don’t ask him to take out your gall bladder.


It’s the nature of Vancouver’s civic inferiority complex that we habitually seize on the “Most Livable” designation as the equivalent of “Best.” But very few realtors sell houses by describing the neighbourhood as “exciting.” Any list that includes Helsinki and 
Auckland is not a compilation of best-selling Lonely Planet editions.


On the other hand, who wants to be interesting? Take Rome. It may well be my favourite destination, but when author Sebastian Cresswell-Turner wrote an article about Roman living for the Guardian, the article was titled, “When in Rome, Plan to Go Home.” “After a while,” he said, “you begin to appreciate the true cost of the many undoubted joys of living in Italy . . . that the flip-side of the cheerful noise and chaos is the mind-boggling complication of life here . . . paying a utilities bill or collecting a registered letter is a major operation, while registering a rental contract, which you have to do . . . is a hallucination-inducing bureaucratic odyssey.” 


It’s worth noting that Travel and Leisure magazine’s 2007 list of Most Interesting Destinations included Beirut, which at the time was about to reclaim its former status as a war zone. I love visiting Bangkok, but the thought of living there and trying to get to work every day makes me shudder. Kathmandu is a thoroughly fascinating city, provided you are not killed trying to cross the street. But Kathmandu has been a regular in the bottom 10 on the same Economist list that so predictably exalts our city.


Livability is a dicey thing to quantify. What do you consider important? The number-two city on the list is Melbourne, Australia. Around the same time the list was released, this headline ran in a Melbourne paper: “BEWARE! Eight-legged visitors are descending on the suburbs.” The story went on to say, “Experts are warning families and children to be careful as Melbourne experiences a population boom in poisonous spiders.” According to my personal priorities, that would preclude me from so much as flying over Melbourne. I wouldn’t even accept a Melbourne postcard unless it had been double-fumigated. 


The quality of city life depends on what you value. If you love Texas-style barbecue, your map of the B.C. coast probably shows no human settlement. Vancouver is probably climbing the ranks of Best Bike Lane Cities, which means we are also soaring on the list of Most Homicidal Motorists. It’s all relative.


Vancouver is indeed a very livable place, at least after your lottery numbers come up. That’s something to be proud of. But most of us love Vancouver for something else, too, something not really quantified in livability rankings: it happens to be gorgeous. The livability ranking just means our city isn’t one of those temperamental model types. It’s a wonder we’re not completely full of ourselves. Right?