Melbourne is kicking goals on the world stage.
Melbourne has a lot of things going for it. After all, this fine city is a regular feature on the Most Liveable Cities list and is of course, the cultural capital of Australia. And now, we can say that it’s a safe city too. The Economist Intelligence Unit released the Safe Cities Index 2021, and looked at 60 major cities around the world. It looked at elements like health and digital safety to figure out which city was the most safe overall. Two Australian cities cracked the top ten, with Sydney in fourth place and Melbourne in ninth.
Safe Cities Index 2021
The Safe Cities Index launched in 2015 and initially looked at 44 indicators and 50 cities. Since then, the Index was updated every two years, and has grown to look at 60 cities across 76 indicators. These indicators are grouped into five pillars: digital security, health security, infrastructure security, personal security and environmental security.
This index is the first one released during COVID-19, and the results of this global pandemic has impacted several cities and their rankings.
“One key thing that urban policymakers first realised [during the pandemic] is that, although this is a health crisis, the response has to deal with a whole lot of other things, such as access to green space and the quality of urban infrastructure,” said Michele Acuto, Professor of Global Urban Politics at the University of Melbourne. “Basic systems have to be up to scratch and often weren’t.”
Environmental security is a new category in the index and looks at factors such as urban forest cover, sustainability masterplan and green economy initiatives. The results of this new category also influenced the final results. Most urban cities have environmental policies, but now need to deliver results. Low and middle income cities did well on environmental security, with high income cities lagging behind.
The Results
Melbourne did slightly better this year than in 2019, coming in ninth place instead of tenth. Our overall score was tied with Hong Kong at 78.6.
The top ten cities were:
- Copenhagen – 82.4
- Toronto – 82.2
- Singapore – 80.7
- Sydney – 80.1
- Tokyo – 80.0
- Amsterdam – 79.3
- Wellington – 79.0
- Hong Kong – 78.6
- Melbourne – 78.6
- Stockholm – 78
Meanwhile, here is the breakdown for each of the five pillars:
Melbourne’s best category was in health security, coming in fourth place. After that, Melbourne placed eight in digital security. It was equally 15th with Madrid in infrastructure security, 18th in personal security, and finally, 25th in environmental security.
To read the full index, click here.