LEADING QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE WORLD’S MOST LIVEABLE CITIES A research report that provides a summary of the key objectives, strategies and plans of 17 of the world’s leading cities for quality of life and liveability. The 17 cities incorporated in this document are the top 11 cities from the 2012 Mercer Quality of Living Survey (Sydney and Bern tied at 10th equal) and the top 10 cities from the EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) Liveability ranking of August 2013. For a number of the cities the research report includes a summary of the strategic planning documents at a federal, state or provincial level within the context of which the city’s own strategic planning process and plans have been prepared, as well as the city’s own desired outcomes, objectives, strategies and plans. This sort of information is helpful to: - learn from the leading cities in the world what they have been doing and plan to do in the future to maintain or improve their position - see where there are comparative gaps in strategic planning (vision, objectives, strategies, etc.) and also the resulting strategic structure of urban planning between a city/city-region and leading international cities - identify potential objectives and strategies that will achieve a desired outcome or vision if they are relevant and applicable - sometimes it is difficult to discover and formulate appropriate objectives and strategies, so why not use ones that already work well in another city - identify the sorts of processes that other cities are using to engage with communities and stakeholders, and see if they could be usefully applied in a city/city-region It is a quite time-consuming and at times difficult research process to find, source and assemble and interpret relevant information from a large number of cities into one place in a consistent format. It also requires knowledge and experience of strategic planning and how international municipalities function. It would be quite expensive to commission an external consulting firm to do this research on a one-off basis, and similarly would take internal research staff considerable time to replicate this study. A variety of public domain sources (printed reports, city, state and federal websites and on-line documents, etc.) were used to assemble and collate information on the vision, objectives, plans and strategies of each of the 17 cities. A number of documents were in original languages in which case the sense of the document wording was used for a translation to English rather than a strict literal translation. In some cases the objectives and strategies were derived and interpreted from City, State or Federal documents.
