The Best City In The World

Why Lausanne became my absolute favorite place to live

Image credit: the author

Let’s begin by acknowledging that there’s no such thing as the best city in the world. No matter what criteria we select to arrive at a ranking, personal taste plays such a large role that any claim will be spurious. All we can do is have our own favorites, based on whatever criteria appeal most to us individually. Every “quality of life” index is merely a reflection of the biases already present in whoever created the index.

There are many wonderful cities in the world and I’ve been fortunate to have experienced more than my fair share as a consequence of a peripatetic life, starting when I was an infant. Although I don’t care for large cities, I acknowledge the charms of Sydney, Paris, Roma, San Francisco, Kyiv, Sankt-Piterburg, Cape Town, and Barcelona. For me, however, it’s the smaller-scale cities that are most appealing: the cities one can walk across in an hour or two, where nature hasn’t been reduced to the occasional sad tree embedded into a small square in an otherwise dead urban environment.

So it is that Adelaide, Bath, Aix-en-Provence, Venezia, Wein, Heidelberg, Prague, and even San Diego, all appeal to me because of their more human scale. The urban center that sits at the pinnacle of my own list of preferences, however, remains the Swiss city…