Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city has been ranked among the top five ‘least livable’ urban centers in the world.
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Global Livability Index 2023, Karachi is ranked 169th out of a total of 173 cities. Only Lagos, Algiers, Tripoli and Damascus are ranked lower than Karachi.
Incidentally, Karachi is the only city in Pakistan ranked on the index.
The index measures living circumstances based on five categories, including stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure, and it concentrates on the post-Covid recovery of cities around the world.
The livability factor is scored and evaluated on a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is deemed intolerable and 100 is regarded optimal.
Karachi received a less than ideal score of 42.5 total. It did the worst on the stability index, scoring 20, which is the same as 2022 and suggests that little has changed in the last year. It received a score of 50 for healthcare, 38.7 for culture and the environment, 75 for education, and 51.8 for infrastructure.
The city’s history on the EIU’s index is also not very favourable. While there was no report released in 2020, Karachi was ranked 136th out of 140 cities in the index back in 2019. It came up at number 134 out of 140 cities in 2022.
Most of the top-ranked cities on the index are from Western Europe and Canada. Austrian capital Vienna topped the list for the second year in a row and has a perfect score of 100 on four out of the five indicators.
