Does a city’s population size impact its quality of life?

3 Australian cities recently were found to offer the highest quality of life.

Now city living isn’t everyone’s cup of tea—the world’s most populous cities can be hectic, noisy, and busy.

Yet, despite the chaos of urban life, cities offer inhabitants a number of comforts and conveniences that are harder to find in smaller towns.

That’s why more people are moving into urban areas around the world.

But do these conveniences reflect in people’s quality of life?

Well, bigger doesn’t always mean better—at least when it comes to population size.

Measuring quality of life

The study used data from Numbeo’s 2022 Quality of Life Index to compare the quality of life in nearly 200 different cities around the world.

For the purposes of this research, we used cities with metropolitan area populations of over 500,000.

The index measures quality of life using eight different metrics:

• Cost of Living
• Purchasing Power
• Property Price to Income Ratio
• Pollution
• Traffic Commute Time
• Safety
• Healthcare
• Climate

A majority of the metrics (six of the eight) seemed to correlate with population size, suggesting that the bigger a city’s population is, the lower its quality of life in those metrics.

Here’s a look at the full list of cities included in the study, along with their overall quality of life scores and their metro area populations:

Out of the 10 cities with the highest quality of life index, three are from Australia - Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane.

It’s worth noting that the negative correlation between the quality of life and population size only appeared in cities above the median population of 2.4 million people, indicating that the size of a city doesn’t appear to impact the quality of life until a certain tipping point.

Then, above the median, there’s a blatant downward trend.

However, Tokyo is an anomaly—its quality of life is much higher than its metropolitan population would predict.

Zooming in on Tokyo

Despite being the world’s largest urban area, Tokyo compares favourably compared to other top megacities across the index.

When ranked among the top five megacities, it places first for Purchasing Power, Safety, Traffic Commute Time, Cost of Living, Healthcare, and Pollution.

What’s so special about Tokyo?

One major thing going for the Japanese city is its immaculate public transport system.

The city’s transport is so efficient, that the city’s rail service once issued a public apology after a train left the station 25 seconds earlier than its scheduled departure.

Another factor that makes Tokyo so livable is its relatively affordable housing, at least compared to other big cities like New York and Hong Kong.

This is partly because of the city’s flexible land zoning system, which makes it relatively easy for developers to build housing and mix-use communities.

As our world becomes increasingly more urbanized, and cities around the world continue to increase in size, will they be able to emulate Tokyo’s growth?

And if not, what other city design trends and innovations can cities utilize to raise the quality of life?

Guest author is Elaine Siu, writer at Visual Capitalist. You can read the original article here. 

About Guest Expert Apart from our regular team of experts, we frequently publish commentary from guest contributors who are authorities in their field.