The Most Horrible City To Live In The World

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 17, 7:21AM EST

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The Most Horrible City To Live In The World — © simongurney / iStock via Getty Images

What is “liveability”? According to The Economist Intelligence Unit, it is a blend of the stability of government and business, strong and reliable infrastructure, schools and healthcare, culture and entertainment, and even sporting events. It uses the factors to rate the 173 cities that are included in The Global Liveability Index 2023.

The index has the highest possible score of 100 and the lowest of zero. Most of the cities high up in the index ranking are old cities in Europe, which have centuries-long histories of open government, and metros in Australia and Canada. Among the top ten cities (11 because of ties) on the list, all but two are in these countries–-Auckland (96 score), and Osaka (96). We have also looked at the worst cities to live in in every state.

The other cities in the top 10 are led by Vienna (98.4), Copenhagen (98), Melbourne (97.7), Sydney (97.4), Vancouver (97.3). Zurich (97.1), Calgary (96.8), Geneva (96.8), and Toronto (96.5). Vienna received scores of 100 for stability, healthcare, education, and infrastructure. The only metric for which its score was not perfect was culture and environment (93.5)

The city at the bottom of the list–Damascus–has a score of 30.7. It was much worse than the next worst city–Tripoli, Libya, which had a score of 40.1.

Damascus, a city of 2.5 million people, is the capital of Syria and has been called the “oldest capital in the world,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It has been a city since 2,500 BC.

The horrors of Syria have been described at length in the CIA Factbook. Ten years of civil war have killed over 300,000 people. Over six million people have lost their homes. The refugee crisis does not appear to have a solution. The researchers at the Factbook wrote: “The conflict in Syria remains one of the two largest displacement crises worldwide (the other is the invasion of Ukraine).” The country is also poor. It has one of the lowest GDPs per capita in the world.

The Economist Intelligence Unit offers little hope that the situation in Damascus will improve.

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.