Challenges Magazine and the INSEAD Alumni Association France got together and ranked the top international cities in terms of professional and private life. Surprise: Dubai tops the charts at number one. Paris comes in only at number 11.
Global cities, which were once found only along the Mediterranean and North Sea coasts, now shine across the planet. It is these urban places where “information, goods, capital, loans, people, orders, converge and flow back out”, according to the famous definition by historian, Fernand Braudel.
For the world of 2014, Challenges took on the task of tallying them up and ranking these cities with INSEAD. This latter provided the ideal partner in so much that the Business Management School, based in Fontainebleau since 1959, has kept up with the times. With branches in Singapore and Abu Dhabi, the establishment has taught over 46,000 executives and entrepreneurs from 156 different nationalities.
Cities were then selected and recorded according to four all-encompassing assessments drawn from thirty criteria dealing with professional and private life: economic dynamism (i.e. quality of labor, access to funding, etc.), quality of life (i.e. sports and cultural facilities, air quality, etc.), cost of living (i.e. real estate, dining and entertainment, etc.), and finally, the overall attractiveness of the city (i.e. young talent, access to technology, etc.).
A panel of 835 INSEAD alumni participated in the survey and some even went as far as to give a testimony of their experience living in one of the selected cities for this feature. An arithmetic mean was then calculated from the four ratings in order to finally draw up a general ranking.
Surprise: Dubai tops the list—a beautiful example for the resilience of this key Persian Gulf city, which, in 2010, was nearing collapse due to the crisis. Hats off also to Madrid, which placed fifth. Considered moribund just a few months ago, the Spanish capital is coming out of the crisis and
now offers both affordable living conditions and enticing business prospects much to the delight of entrepreneurs and expatriates.Among the older Asian cities, Mumbai in India is ranked 13th and Shanghai is ranked 9th.
Paris, on the other hand, came up with the worst results in terms of economic dynamism. Even the Parisian quality of life, which has always been its strong suit, is seen as less and less significant in the eyes of foreigners who are shifting to Amsterdam, listed as the most pleasant city to live.
