# The world's best cities

By [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com) · 2020-10-29

instagram, london, moscow, new-york, paris, report, resonance-consultancy, tokyo, toronto, urbanism, vancouver, worlds-best-cities

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Whenever you see a best-of-anything ranking, you should probably ask yourself what the hell "best" even means. In this case, Resonance Consultancy is [ranking the world's cities](https://www.bestcities.org/reports/2021-worlds-best-cities/) based on six alliterative categories: place, people, programming, product, prosperity, and promotion.

Some of these metrics are qualitative, but many are, in fact, quantitative. Number of COVID-19 infections in 2020; number of direct destinations served by the city's airports; number of foreign-born residents; number of top-rated restaurants (TripAdvisor); most Instagram check-ins, and so on.

The result is this list of the world's best cities:

1.  London
    
2.  New York
    
3.  Paris
    
4.  Moscow
    
5.  Tokyo
    
6.  Dubai
    
7.  Singapore
    
8.  Barcelona
    
9.  Los Angeles
    
10.  Madrid
    
11.  Rome
    
12.  Chicago
    
13.  Toronto
    
14.  San Francisco
    
15.  Abu Dhabi
    

I arbitrarily chose the top 15 cities in order to make sure that Toronto was included in this ranking. If you'd like to download a full copy of the 2021 World's Best Cities report, you can [do that over here](https://www.bestcities.org/reports/2021-worlds-best-cities/). I recommend you check out their performance criteria.

Toronto, for example, performs very well when it comes to "people." That's fairly consistent across most of these rankings. But it didn't fare so well when it comes to "place." That category includes things like the average number of sunny days and the number of high quality sights & landmarks.

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*Originally published on [Brandon Donnelly](https://brandondonnelly.com/the-worlds-best-cities)*