The safest city in the world? Copenhagen. This is the conclusion of the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in the fourth edition of the biennial study “Safe Cities Index”. For the first time, criteria of environmental safety were also looked at this time. That gave the Danish capital a good push so that it could overtake the previous leaders.
As part of the study, the EIU examined 60 cities on the basis of 76 safety factors. It covers the areas of infrastructure, digital life, personal safety, environmental factors and health. This year, the pandemic and factors such as Covid-19 mortality also played a role in the evaluation.
Scramble at the top
The cities that performed best in the new ranking therefore had factors that show how closely general security, social cohesion and trust in society are linked. Well-off cities in the Asia-Pacific region performed better on average for health security, European cities for personal security, and North American cities for digital security.
This year’s result is only surprising at first glance. In the past three years, Tokyo, Singapore and Osaka had always occupied the top positions and in the same order. This time, however, Copenhagen cleared with 82.4 out of 100 points. Second and third place went to Toronto and Singapore. The only German city in the ranking is in 13th place – Frankfurt. Singapore and Tokyo remain in the top five, but slide down to third and fifth respectively.
“A closer look, however, shows that this change represents more of a scramble within a tightly packed field of the front runners than a major reorganization,” the authors say. The cities that performed best in the index each year would always have had similar overall scores. This year, 10th place was separated from 1st place by just 4.2 points.
The top 10 safest cities in the world according to EUI can be found in the photo gallery above.
Source: Safe Cities Index 2021