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Vienna again named world's most liveable city
- adrianh 13y agoI've actually been thinking of moving to Vienna. Anybody in Vienna have a moment to type out some thoughts on what it's like to live there?
- sirwitti 13y agothe good thing about vienna (or maybe austria) is that it's the biggests city in austria. if something interesting is going on in austria, most often it's happening in vienna. (culturally, jobwise, universitywise,...). so austria is very centered around vienna in my experience.
- phaer 13y agoIn general it's quite nice. As a viennese native living abroad, i especially miss the public transport system and some of the theaters. Vienna also has far less social segregation than other cities of it's size (~2M), looks extremely clean is quite safe. Do you have any more specific questions? You can post them here or contact me per jabber/email (in my profile) if you want.
- hoggle 13y agoLike many typical Austrians/Viennese I've got a love/hate relationship with Austria/Vienna. On the one hand it's very gemütlich (cosy/comfy -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemütlichkeit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemütlichkeit) to live here but on the other hand it can be quite boring as even very young people often act like they are already retired. I believe there aren't many places in the world where you enjoy as much actual freedom as you do in Austria but people mostly don't make much use of it, good luck with getting people engaged in anything interesting (maybe life here is already too comfortable). Not having the cultural "baggage" of having gotten pampered your whole life, Vienna could very well be the ideal place to be as you might be able to actually enjoy its benefits. You should definitely come and visit, there is tons of stuff to see - it's somewhat of a cultural Disney Land with an amazing history. While doing so you could dip your toes into what it would mean to live here, there are quite some Americans around who really like it and have been living here for many years.
- raverbashing 13y agoGranted, I visited for a couple of days, but I was positively and deeply surprised by it. Everything seems nice. The city is Beautiful. Public trams go everywhere and the transport system is top notch. Cons: they speak "Bavarian German" and they seem to be paranoid about the internet (more than in Germany). They have cold winters as well if I'm not mistaken.
- matlock 13y ago>Bavarian German you wouldn't want to say that in Vienna though :). We are pretty proud of our Austrian German. Winters are cold, and summers are hot, but still fine. Really nice to live here though.
- raverbashing 13y agoOh sure, it's Austrian German :) But I still couldn't get anything they threw at me, except when they spoke Hochdeutsch But then again since my German is not the greatest they would switch pretty quickly to English.
- MatthiasP 13y agoVienna is nice IF you speak German sufficiently well to get along with the Austrian dialect and you are willing to cope with those four months of harsh winter where you hardly ever see the sun. Apart of that it's pretty much like every other German speaking city, quality of life is high, but so are the taxes.
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- sirwitti 13y agoFunnily enough the viennese people are considered grumpy and often rude compared to the rest of austria :) but still, the city is awesome! martin, living in vienna
- kfk 13y agoSo, I passed by Vienna kayaking down the Danube. We liked the “Neu Donau”, basically an unused arm of the Danube with super ultra clean water. People go there swimming, surfing or just for a walk, it’s super cool. We didn’t really like the city center, way to posh for us. But then again, we were coming to Vienna on a kayak from the woods, that might have skewed our vision of the city. But overall, if you can, go visit Austria, it’s a small gem. They have this tradition of doing naked sun baths everywhere, but you do get used to that after a while. By the way, I lived in Munich. It’s an amazing city. Lakes, mountains, rivers, you name it. And German people are super nice, people stereotype them way too much. I am looking forward to go back to Germany soon. I am really not a big fan of Dutch/Nordic speaking countries.
- egeozcan 13y agoAfter living in Stuttgart for the last 5 years, I can tell that these stereotypes describe some Germans perfectly well but the important thing here is those account for less than 1% of the population. The remaining 99%? Those are these very friendly people who have this amazing ability to be relaxed and efficient at the same time.
- MrBuddyCasino 13y agoI live there, and in my experience, Stuttgart is not a very good city to live in, and I know quite some people who share that sentiment. Swabians are famously unapproachable, though I do respect them a lot. Thats one reason I'm moving to Munich - anyone knows a good company to work for there? :)
- Evgeny 13y agoDon't forget that there are multiple "most liveable cities", according to different reports. Melbourne ranked world's most liveable city - again http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/melbourne-ranked-worlds-most-liveable-city--again-20130828-2sprk.html http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/melbourne-ranked-wo...
- morganherlocker 13y agoThis is common in many industries as well. Practically every car model gets awarded "Best XYZ 2014!". I have definitely noticed the trend with companies in my area, of which 5 seem to all hold the title of "Best Place to Work".
- grecy 13y agoI think it's interesting to see which cities (and countries) continually feature in the top 10-20-30 spots in each different report - and which ones don't.
- gutnor 13y agoIt is weird how traditional journalism has not caught up with internet mentality. What about linking to the study (http://www.mercer.es/articles/quality-of-living-survey-report-2011 http://www.mercer.es/articles/quality-of-living-survey-repor...), hell, even their official press release contains more information than Reuters "article". Also what about giving us the complete list. I suppose the 499$ you need to pay to get the report give you more meat than simply the list, so why not give it for free ? Past years result can be found on good old wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercer_Quality_of_Living_Survey
- 4ad 13y agoI live in Vienna and I see these surveys all the time. I moved in Vienna 2.5 years ago. Vienna is a good place to live (otherwise I would have left) provided you don't care about things that are simply not available, for example no real IT sector, no startup scene etc. It's okay, but it's nothing spectacular. I don't understand what these people find so fascinating about the city. My friends share my opinion too. I guess the people doing the surveys simply care about completely different things in life compared to myself. I read their impressions, and I either don't care about those things at all, or I find them completely wrong. The reviewer simply has different expectations than myself. For example, a couple of week ago I've seen another article like this. Among other things, the author liked the huge variety of beers and cheese found in Vienna. I don't know exactly why this matters for such a survey but whatever. Anyway, I happen to be somewhat of a beer and cheese aficionado and in my opinion Austrian beer is terrible, bland, and all the same. Go to Belgium to find good beer. There are not too many types of beer. And don't get me started on the cheese. Of course these things are subjective things, but because they are subjective things they have no place in such an article. Other issues are more subtle, for example, nice people. Every article claims Vienna has nice people but doesn't divulge either the nationality and cultural background of the reviewer, nor the way said reviewer interacted with viennese people. For example I don't find anything nice about viennese people because I grew in a country where attributes associated with nice people are different than Austrian attributes about nice people. These people may be nice, I'm sure they are, but I don't see it. Similarly, I'm sure they see me as a misanthropic, asocial, arrogant individual. It's the same like with restaurants, an american will complain that european restaurant service is precarious, I will complain that the western-european restaurant service is annoying and offensive. The cultural background is different, expectations in social settings are different. Articles like this skip over all this stuff. Anyway, there are some really nice things in Vienna but no article I've seen mentioned them. They are subjective things, but most of what these article say is subjective.
- facepalm 13y agoYou are probably right. However, presumably we tend to underestimate how horrible most places in the world really are. Compared to the average city, perhaps Vienna really is quite good.
- freehunter 13y agoOn these "most livable" city indexes, I wish they would take into account how much it costs to live there compared to wages. San Fransisco is high on their list, but from what I'm hearing, it's really not the panacea that these lists often make it out to be. High wages, but higher cost of living and horrible living conditions compared to the Midwest, for example. I have a friend who just bought a two-story, four bedroom house with two acres of land in a nice area of Beer City, USA (Grand Rapids, Michigan) for $90,000, and has a 10 mile, 10 minute commute to a downtown office where he's making $70,000/yr. He can drive his own car and find a place to park in a nicely cultural city of ~200,000. I don't live in Grand Rapids, but if I were moving somewhere I'd be looking for a city like that. That is what I would consider highly livable. Can you find a two-story house with an acre or more of land in SF for not much more than your yearly salary? I want a list of cities where salary and cost of living are taken into account along with culture and safety.
- debt 13y agoLiving conditions? The midwest has been and is still being hit with one of the worst winters in a few decades. Also I hear that "land is cheap elsewhere" argument all the time. You're right; if I was 82 and wanted to settle down I'd buy a ranch somewhere in the palm desert for 100k, but I'm not. I'm young and I want to work. I'll live in my shitty apartment in SF long before I whither away on some plot of land in the midwest any day. Yes there are cheap houses in swamplands; probably a dollar an acre. But then what? Cool I have cheap house totally removed from all the action. However, if that's your thing then do it.
- Pxtl 13y ago> You're right; if I was 82 and wanted to settle down I'd buy a ranch somewhere in the palm desert for 100k, but I'm not. I'm not even sure why 82-year-olds do this. It's pretty much guaranteed you'll lose your ability to drive before you lose your ability to keep a home. Why set yourself up for the heartache of finding out you can no longer live in the house you just bought because it's inaccessible by anything but your private car you can no longer use?
- shas3 13y ago
- bane 13y agoThe more I travel, the more convinced I am that the American experiment with car oriented cities was a disaster that will take untold billions of dollars to rectify. It's affected everything from public safety (e.g. police can no longer walk a patrol), to loss of community (people don't really shop in the same place they live), lost productivity (stuck in traffic), and on and on and on. I'm very encouraged by recent, walkable focused, mixed-use development around mass transit stops in the DC area. If they're successful, they could quickly pay back the tax dollars spent getting the transit built, and lead to a model for development in the U.S. In other words, they're building more classic European style city centers, but as all new construction, and even better, informed by the mistakes and success of the last few decades. I'm not sure it would ever get rid of the suburb (there's too many reasons to not want to raise your children in the city), but there's innovation there too. Many newer suburbs are being built with walkability in mind, usually with a small commercial core with groceries, a coffee shop, laundry and a few restaurants, many have mass transit shuttle stops and commuter lots nearby and with telecommuting becoming more common, there's less of a need to make the daily drive. I live in a suburb like this and have at least a dozen restaurants (from fast food to high end), two coffee shops, laundry, a gym, a Tae Kwon Do school, a bike shop, 2 ice cream parlors, a grocery, a movie theater a couple salons, a music shop, a medical practice, dentist, chiropractor, orthodontist, optometrist, liquor store, a bank and more within a short, comfortable 5-10 minute walk from my house. I'm also surrounded by green space and parks, schools and swimming pools are walkable and we're planning on building out space for a public library and other amenities soon. I telecommute most days and if I have to go to work I take the bus into the city. Other than my weekly client site visits I pretty much don't drive my car. In my region, this development model accounts for easily 40-50% of the new developments. European cities aren't without problems (awkward living accommodations in old buildings, lack of handicapped or elderly accessibility, etc.), but remind us that before the auto lobby took over and screwed up urban design, cities could be built to high density, very livable, very human scale and that doing so makes wonderful places to live and work.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago"...American experiment with car oriented cities..." America is almost 3,000 miles from coast to coast. 1500 miles or more top to bottom. When the auto became popular, most people lived on farms. What part of that was an experiment? Perhaps you just meant that in a poetic sense, if so, apologies. But it bears pointing out, especially to a younger HN audience that might have spent most of their lives on an education or corporate campus, living in easy reach of mass transit -- the way things are now are the result of necessity and efficiency. While I'm discounting the role of urban planning, for the most part it's not like there's somebody somewhere pushing buttons on a huge SimCity. Once again, apologies if I overreacted to your phraseology.
- dpeck 13y agoThey certainly like their dogs and gelato more any other city I've been to.
- ulfw 13y agoYou haven't been to Santa Monica then...
- gst 13y ago"Most liveable" always depends on what factors are important to you. If you average out everything I guess Vienna looks quite nice: Low income disparity, good social security system, low crime rate, etc. But if you're a HN reader it might not be the optimal place to live for you: A population that's in general quite hostile to entrepreneurship, insane amounts of bureaucracy, laws that make it unnecessarily hard to run your own company, etc. Apart from that the weather is terrible, large parts of the population are hostile to immigration and are quite racist, people are grumpy all the time, ...
- finishingmove 13y agoI had to look up the whole list, and found it on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_quality_of_living#cite_note-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_quality_of_li... (link to PDF at the bottom). It's for 2012. Judge for yourself.
- matlock 13y agoEver plan on visiting Vienna? Why not live there and build tools for other developers. We are hiring at Codeship (https://www.codeship.io https://www.codeship.io) for our Vienna office. And if you ever come visit the city let me know at flo@codeship.io. Happy to show the HN crowd around town.
- DrJokepu 13y agoI will take this seriously when Mercer and Reuters will move their corporate headquarters from the 6th Avenue in Manhattan and Canary Wharf in London respectively to Vienna.
- julianpye 13y agoIt is interesting that besides Auckland, the top three cities basically share the same culture - Munich shares more with Vienna and Zurich, than with Berlin or Hamburg. That culture is deeply rooted Catholic, bourgeois, orderly with little crime and corruption.
- fit2rule 13y agoI live in Vienna. I don't understand how this is the most liveable city in the world - unless by liveable, it means "concrete jungle monstrosity - with good public transportation". I honestly think this is one of the most oppressive cities in the world, and I just don't get how it managed to gain this acclaim, every single year. I guess things must be really bad in a majority of the western world. The thing is, the city is really not beautiful. A majority of the population live in apartment buildings that were constructed in the 1870's, where the primary requirement was "pack as many people into the city block as possible but don't go over 6 stories". This means that for a majority of citizens, the sky is but a thin, dull strip. Perhaps its the public transportation, the access to food (Billa's are everywhere) and .. the welfare state. In fact, I'm convinced its only because of the state of welfare that people think Vienna is so great. Remove the AMS from the equation, and Vienna is a barely suitable concrete jungle.
- stewbrew 13y agoChances are you're a spoiled Viennese CS student.
- fit2rule 13y agoThere are a lot of those here, but no. I'm Australian. I think Vienna is monstrous.
- stewbrew 13y agoSo that's why you were surprised about the kangaroo. Anyway, do you think other European capitals like Berlin or Paris are any less "monstrous"?
- fit2rule 13y agoNo, I don't think they're less monstrous - the fact is that mass populations living so closely together, in architecture that does not motivate their interaction as a neighborhood, is a real problem. There are endless rows of these city-apartment buildings, built to maximize space and landlord profit, which simply puts people into boxes and discourages interaction. Europe is full of these cities. So maybe that is why Vienna - where its entirely unfashionable to despise the city for its physical oppressions - gets the accolades every year. Berlin, at least, makes an effort to build community in the neighborhood and of course Paris has centuries of history with precisely this notion in its street courses; Vienna has always been an imperial place, and it shows. The impersonality of the architecture seems to have been long-since inherited. They even re-built it this way, after the War .. so I believe in fact the "Concrete Jungle", "City-As-Machine" thing is so strong here, that its just not noticed any more ..
- dubfan 13y agoThese Mercer livability rankings are based on quality of life for expatriates working for multinational corporations. Every year these rankings make the headline rounds but articles fail to mention that detail or explain why that's important. In particular these rankings don't account for cost of living in the way you would expect if it were a real "quality of living" survey. This becomes a ranking of "how well you can live in a city on an unlimited budget".
- fractallyte 13y agoI've been living here for the last six weeks. Coincidentally, yesterday was the initial induction session for candidate startups shortlisted for 'Go Silicon Valley', organized by the Austrian Economic Chambers (WKO). For such a small city, there certainly seemed to be a respectable number of startup teams... Today was sunny and warm(ish), so I left my apartment and computer, travelled 30 minutes across town to Heiligenstadt,and shortly after was lying on a hillside overlooking the city. Quiet and refreshing. Coming back into town by tram, then walking, the bustle of the streets around St Stephen's cathedral was quite a contrast. Now I'm back here in front of the machine, picking away at a cake, amused at this timely article. Vienna certainly is beautiful in parts, grungy in others. But so far, all the people I've met have been friendly and accommodating. Transport is excellent. The cakes are amazing. Definitely liveable!
- arbuge 13y agoPerhaps the most liveable city if you speak German...
- lazyjones 13y agoVienna is good overall, but it's passive smoking hell. 99% of all clubs ignore non-smoking laws according to a recent study and you often find particle concentrations higher than on a busy road inside various cafes/clubs and washing all your clothes after a night in a busy place is a must. For some people this will be a sign of relaxed, "laissez-faire" style life, for others like me this is unbearable and I hate it. The Mercer study Reuters mentions is, by the way, apparently only based on a few publicly available key statistical indicators and not on actual surveys.
- udit99 13y agoCan anyone comment on the startup/tech scene in Vienna? I need to move there for some immigration reasons and am trying to figure out what kind of jobs I can look forward to. Also, how easy can it be to get by at the workplace with english + broken German ?