Secrets of the World’s Most Livable City

If you’ve seen any “Most Livable City” ranking lists, you know Vienna: The Austrian capital is a perennial champion of these popular annual listings of places said to boast a notably enviable quality of life, based on factors like safety, health and education scores, access to transit and green space, cultural amenities, cost of living, and so forth. The real value of such rating exercises may be up for debate, but it’s hard to argue with Vienna’s utter dominance of the Municipal Livability Bowl.

“We must be doing something right,” said Maria Vassilakou, the city’s former deputy mayor. In her comments at this year’s CityLab DC conference, the Austrian Green Party lawmaker offered a crash course in assembling the good life, Viennese-style—beginning with how her city defines the L-word itself.