All Those "Most Livable City" Rankings, and Not One of Them Seems to Know Where Young People Want to Live | QDaily Research Lab

When young people define "livable," what they want in the end is something to look forward to, as little friction as possible, people like themselves, and a bit of respect.

These days, what are a city's options for gilding its own face?

First, award yourself an elegant title:

• City of Charm, Historic Capital, the Jiangnan of the North, the Venice of the East, Garden City... Each of these slogans has its own angle and emphasis, but they share one quality: after reading the title, you still can't guess which city it belongs to;
• Campaign hard to be named a "National Civilized City." The campaign involves: every street stall in town vanishing for the duration, so residents can't even buy a jianbing for breakfast; a sudden surge of sprinkler trucks and sanitation workers; and, right on cue, a mass text saying "The city is our home, its civility is up to us all," so that migrant residents — the ones who hit a wall at every counter trying to get a residence permit or buy an apartment — can feel the long-lost warmth of home;
• Advertise yourself with figures and indexes nobody quite understands: we are a "livable city," a "top-100 city." China's city rankings vary in fame and credibility, but every city can collect at least one or two of them. Worst case, there's always "City With the Most Growth Potential" — the consolation prize of the city world;
• Sell yourself, on evidence nobody can check, as "where a famous person fell in love / made their name / wrote their book." One more step and it would be "this is where a well-known artist lost his mind"...

Then dress the city up with ornaments that seem to have no future beyond self-congratulation:

• Whether or not there is anything to work with, go faux-antique: paint the walls of perfectly good streets grey and reproduce the ancient town that every part of the country already has;
• Having no natural endowment to speak of but wanting to catch the flower-festival wave, plant a fresh batch of trees in a hurry — and the site does successfully fill up with people packed shoulder to shoulder;
• Trumpet a concept like "smart city," which in practice means installing a row of street lamps with solar panels on top...

Next, host some big events — and to make them look sufficiently high-end, put the residents through hell:

• Bid for a marathon to become an "international metropolis" or a "city of vitality," then gridlock the entire city on race day, while residents who actually like running can't find a decent route or space to run on any ordinary day;
• Bid for a "national forum" or an "international summit," shut down construction for a month, and when it's over nothing much has changed except that housing prices have inexplicably ticked up again;
• Try to grow a cultural atmosphere overnight by staging music festivals and art exhibitions — except that "cultural atmosphere" and "overnight" are contradictory demands, and the quality of the art on show is very... un-artistic...

Finally, build some cityscapes, on purpose or by accident:

• Every second- and third-tier city is busy digging a subway; the whole place looks like one giant construction site, and downtown leaves no room for people or cars to move;
• A contest of strange buildings, shaped like egg beaters, bottle openers, syringes and giant underpants — kitchenware, clothing, even medical instruments, a full set — touching, really, in how close to daily life it stays;
• Meanwhile the residential compounds and street-front shops that ought to stay close to daily life go international, in a mash-up of Roman, Greek, Byzantine and lavish European;
• Public facilities — libraries, sports centers, parks — get clustered in one corner of the city, where the plaza out front turns automatically into a parking lot for people who have traveled a long way to get there;
• Where the real food is, nobody knows, but every place has its "food street," whose shop signs assemble "the delicacies of the world" and "the finest flavors on earth"...

All this gilding may make our parents' generation feel that "our county has finally held its head high." But in earlier QDaily Research Lab surveys, most young people found this kind of city beautification baffling and embarrassing.

When it comes to choosing which city to live in, young people — who still have a choice — have always been the careful ones. An American survey of 1,000 people aged 18 to 35 found:

• They move between cities more often than any other age group, and will relocate for "better opportunities" or simply to "live a different way";
• 87% still hope to find a city to settle in eventually, and 78% of those think the choice should be made before 35;
• But 53% will live in several cities first, without asking from the start whether this is the place to settle down;
• 74% have a timetable in mind when they move somewhere — starting with "how long do I plan to stay here?"

Young people in China are going through similar choices, moves and plans. While cities decide whom to let in, young people are deciding what role each city will play in their lives, and they have their own ideas about what a good city looks like and how to live in one.

That mobility is also why young people pay closer attention to their surroundings, and why "the city" is more of an issue for them than for others. Which city to live in, which cities count as "livable" — the questions get turned over and over. Across all our open calls for responses, the ones about cities and livability draw the most opinions.

As described above, for all sorts of reasons, cities large and small have never stopped fussing over their image from every angle, and young people have "had enough of these strenuous city-image campaigns." What draws the mockery is that these scenes and gestures have little to do with how residents actually live; most of them probably exist for economic returns, for prestige projects, or to satisfy some evaluation metric.

Not that "livable city" rankings are a joke, either. The Evaluation Index System for China's Livable Cities, for instance, covers "seven first-level indicators, including ecological environment, health index, urban safety index, convenience index, comfort index, economic affluence, social civility index and city reputation, and 48 second-level indicators." But do young people really size up a city by that standard?

Below we've pulled together the results of several QDaily Research Lab open calls on cities, and tried to sort out how young people define a "livable city." If you have other ideas about what a good city would be, add them in the comments:

The sweeping "macro reasons" matter, of course, but young people weigh them their own way

QDaily's survey "What does a city have to offer today to count as livable?" drew 19,700 responses. The four most popular answers were reasonable and yet slightly unexpected: housing prices that aren't absurd, no smog, work you can actually do, and a commute under half an hour.

Caring that much about housing prices may not sound very "young," but prices that high do push out some of the people who want to stay in a big city. And if the goal were only to escape smog and walk to work, there would be no reason to remain in a first-tier city at all. Put another way: the first-tier cities where so many young people cluster are, in a sense, not "livable" for them. What brings them there is the second-ranked answer, job opportunities — work they can do and want to do, and somewhere else to go when they want to switch.

On the other factors, young people will often settle for the next best thing:

1. Can't buy an apartment, so hope instead that your salary (and your prospects) can keep up with the rent (and with how fast it rises);

2. Afraid of smog, so Beijing is out — but Shanghai's air doesn't seem that extreme, so it's worth considering;

3. The city is too big, but if the subway works well you can put up with it; at worst, live as close to a station as you can;

4. And on the exhausting day when you decide to take a taxi to work, could it at least not be impossible to hail one, or jammed solid the moment you step outside?

5. And of course, if a city offers public rental housing, or lets you draw on your housing fund without a fight, and most people actually know these policies exist, that's a bonus nothing else can replace.

Grand urban makeovers matter less than removing a few "small but certain hassles"

As young people see it, city life comes with plenty of "small but certain hassles" that ought to be fixed, and how comfortable a city feels is bound up with them.

1. Delivery services that go the last step: "Send the parcel home and nobody's there to take it; send it to the office and it arrives on a Saturday" is one of the most annoying things in daily life for most people, which makes a building manager or a neighborhood service that will hold packages surprisingly important;

2. The share of shared bikes in working order: the last 1.5 kilometers from the subway station to home never had the right vehicle for it, and now that shared bikes can finally replace the dangerous electric tricycles, may every search not come up empty, or turn up bikes with a pedal or a seat missing;

3. The variety of places to eat and shop within a kilometer of home: few delivery options nearby; cook for yourself and the wet market looks dirty while the supermarket is too far; buy household basics and the supermarket is far, the convenience store doesn't stock what you need, and an online order never quite reaches the free-shipping threshold;

4. The density of public space you can sit down in: mainly for "lunch and dinner are both booked, going home in between is too much trouble, and there's nowhere else to go," and "after dinner your friends want to do something else, but a place where you can eat and then keep having fun is hard to find";

5. How civilized the renovation is: the neighbors will renovate sooner or later, but there ought to be some basic rules — don't wake me up to the point where I want to blow up the building, and don't let the contractor dump the debris wherever it lands and block the stairwell;

6. How easy it is to cross the street: the road is too wide, you can see the building you're heading for, so why is the footbridge or the underpass so far away?

7. How easy it is to get into your compound: every time you come home you have to walk half a kilometer or loop around the block — couldn't there be one more gate?

8. How far cashless payment reaches: if you leave both cash and bank card at home, the blank stare from a stranger you ask for help is understandable, but could your phone at least carry you from a cardless ATM withdrawal through to a self-service ticket machine?

9. The number of "things you must carry yourself when you go out": tissues in public restrooms, water from a public fountain or a vending machine, umbrellas you can borrow at the mall — are they there when you need them, or do you have to pack the full kit before you dare leave the house?

What does a city's "tolerance and openness" actually consist of?

Alongside our own results, we took in some of the younger-skewing criteria used by "livable city" rankings abroad:

1. Density of independent bookstores: the ones selling Five Years of Gaokao Papers, Three Years of Mock Exams don't count;

2. Green space: whether there's grass hardly matters, as long as the grass isn't a reason to keep people off it;

3. Support for artists and public events: so that nobody ends up feeling that "every restaurant, shop and entertainment venue around here serves either the old or the young, and young people have been written off," or "there's no one to hang out with, and a city this big is still boring";

4. How different one street is from the next: don't make people feel that "everywhere looks the same";

5. The range of everyday activities: somewhere to walk, run and ride a bike;

6. Public tolerance of views unlike one's own: not just treating respect for LGBT people as a box to tick for political correctness.

And "a feeling of real life" has nothing to do with ancient towns or long histories

If we make "a feeling of real life," or street-level life, more concrete, we think it has to include:

1. The variety of commercial space: besides shopping malls, a city still has traditional markets to walk through;

2. The trust index of the fruit stall at the compound gate: that is... if you forget your money, you can pay next time;

3. The neighbor-friendliness index: the person across the hall says hello when you meet, rather than coming to your door only to call you "1507";

4. The "signs of life" index: better than a bare stretch of pavement are shops along the street, so that walking home alone after dark still feels reasonably safe;

5. The late-night canteen index: a small restaurant near home with comfort food you can count on, where beyond the scripted "enjoy your meal" you can also trade a few words with a server you know.

What details add up to a city's "level of civility"?

How would you actually measure a city's "level of civility" today? In our open calls, what people cared about most were things that look trivial:

1. The detail young people ranked first: at a crosswalk, do people yield to cars, or do cars yield to people?

2. Do electric bikes weave across the road ignoring the lights?

3. Do people line up on their own while waiting for a bus or a train?

4. Are public places smoke-free, and reasonably quiet?

5. Can restaurant servers and government clerks alike be polite? And could taxi drivers stop making passengers navigate for them?

6. Can you walk through a train or bus station without a hustler striking up a conversation?

7. How clean the streets are, and how many trash bins there are.

In a QDaily Research Lab poll at the end of 2016 titled "Which social-media debates did you get sick of this year?", "fleeing Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou — and going back to them" drew the most votes, earning it a place among the topics people find tiresome.

Yet those three cities keep turning up on social media, in film and television and in marketing campaigns, and they keep people's attention. Honestly, no one can deny how much these giant cities offer young people in jobs and cultural variety, and no one can deny the pressure that housing prices and work rhythms bring, or the "small but certain dissatisfactions" of traffic, errands and weather.

So "what makes a city livable" has become a question that never goes away.

Material comfort is the first thing human nature reaches for; the natural environment, safety, social and cultural conditions and public governance come after it. Against the annual flood of "happiest cities," "ten most livable cities" and "ten best quality-of-life cities," young people may take more seriously the rankings weighted toward the material substance of daily life — the British lifestyle magazine Monocle, for instance, publishes a Quality of Life Survey every year. Monocle scores cities on 22 indicators: housing prices and cost of living, the number of public libraries, how free residents are, the price of an apartment down to the price of a coffee and a lunch, and how easy it is to spend time outdoors.

Because in the end, when young people define "livable," what they care about is having something to look forward to, as little friction as possible, people like themselves, and a bit of respect.

Cover image: Lin Xiaoyao