The Best Cities to Live In Can Be the Most Boring to Visit

"To travel is to live", wrote Danish fairy tale author and prolific traveler Hans Christian Andersen. But are cities rated as highly "livable" necessarily also the best cities for travelers? Rankings of the world's most livable cities might tempt you to put them on your list of places to visit. This, I contend, would be a grave error.

Copenhagen-the town in which Andersen lived for most of his life-is identified as the world's most livable city in the latest Global Liveability Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). But if you visit, you won't wonder why Andersen was so keen to get away on a regular basis. Yes, it's clean, well-organized, and picture-postcard pretty. It's uncontestably nice . But should you really priorities such things when you're traveling, or is the real purpose, and delight, of travel to be found in a degree of discomfort?

Going Underground

Consider the subway. In Copenhagen, the trains are driverless oblongs that could be mistaken for a module of a cartoon space station. They're spotlessly clean, self-driving, and eerily quiet. Considered solely as a mode of transport, the Københavns Metro gets full marks, but as an experience it's memorable only in its anonymity. Compare this to London or New York City, where the underground network is part of the iconography and mythology of the city. From the signage to the appearance of the trains themselves, and the characters you meet on board, a trip below ground is an essential (if not always comfortable) experience for the visitor.

The comparison demonstrates the reason why livability isn't a good guide for travelers. The folk who compile these reports overlook the essential currency of a traveler: anecdotal value. Sharing public transportation with a city's most eccentric and extroverted characters (and a few wild rodents) might not always be nice, but if you're traveling, you're only going to do it a handful of times. You don't want your daily commute to be memorable, but the whole point of travel is that you're not on your daily commute.

"Livability" Rewards Homogeneity and Expense

One of the primary reasons that livability indexes exist in the first place is to help corporations decide how much of a hardship allowance to pay staff sent to live in that place, and so the whole enterprise serves a narrow set of interests which rewards homogeneity, gentrification, and insularity. Singapore, Sydney and the Scandinavian capitals might be commendably "livable," but also lack distinction: part of the point is that you can easily shop the same brands and visit the same cafe chains, all while working for the same global corporation. If what you want from a trip is home comforts with a different skyline, livable cities might be your thing. But to me, the purpose of travel is to take you out of your comfort zone, through encounters with cultural differences and a vitality that you cannot find at home.

Another common factor among the world's most livable cities is that they are expensive. Not every expensive city is ranked high in livability (NYC, for example, is the third-lowest ranked city in the United States), but there is a clear correlation. This isn't so much of a problem for the itinerant professionals whose comfort the index has in mind, but it makes them inaccessible for travelers from less affluent parts of the world. I don't like the idea that being "cheap" makes a destination particularly alluring, but it is still faintly nauseating to pay $20 for a beer.

Stories Matter More Than Safety (Within Limits)

Can't a city be livable and offer anecdotal value? Isn't that factored into the definition? Yes and no. While "cultural availability," "sporting availability" and "food & drink" all feature as metrics in the EIU index, they don't capture the full extent of a city's potential to produce memorable moments. The methodology also places much weight on safety and stability, which, while obviously no bad thing in itself (and wonderful if you're a long-term resident), does not translate as a benefit to a visitor.

This isn't to say that safety isn't something to take seriously when deciding on a travel destination, but it's a question of sufficiency. A destination merely needs to be safe enough ; more safety brings a limited benefit, and might in fact have a diminishing effect. Singapore is one of the safest cities in the world, but try to explore it on foot, and you'll spend so much time waiting for the crosswalk lights to change, overlooked by the police cameras that poach jaywalkers, that you might give up before you actually see much of the city.

A Risky Business?

When I mentioned to a friend recently that I was going to Naples, she shuddered. "I'd never go there; it's far too dangerous!" I found this curious, because she (like me) lives in London. The city is not suffering from the epidemic of street crime that your social-media feed might suggest-with bicycle-mounted artful dodgers roaming free on every suburban street just waiting to pluck your phone from your clammy palm-but nonetheless it's a place where you should keep your wits about you, as well as your possessions. Naples, too, has its problems with pickpockets and gang violence, but your chance of becoming a victim in either city remains, on a short trip, very low.

My friend's aversion illustrates a fallacy in our perception of risk: the unvisited place always seems more dangerous, as we don't have any direct experience against which to balance the warnings and scaremongering Instagram reels.

Often people will discount visiting somewhere because they think it's dangerous, without realizing that the place in which they live is, objectively, equally as unsafe.

Okay, So It's Not All Bad

I know I've set myself a challenging task: to convince you that cities as objectively pleasant as Copenhagen, Vienna, Melbourne, Sydney and Zurich (the current top five) aren't worth your time. While none of them are places to which I'd hurry back, I can understand why many tourists find them appealing. What I want to ward against, though, is any assumption that the factors that secure their "livability" are those that should draw you to visit.

Vienna is beautiful, and I can't in good conscience advise you not to go. But what makes Vienna great to visit is the imperial architecture and its cultural history, and outside of the historic center it's nice but nondescript. The stately coffeehouses are evocative, but prohibitively expensive and made to feel inauthentic by the preponderance of tourists, and a sense of starched formality pervades the city. If you're prepared to pay through the nose, and don't mind the crowds, get on a train southwards and spend a few days in Venice instead. It's far less livable-your house will flood, the mosquitoes are vicious, and getting around is a nightmare-but for all that it's magical.

To Travel Is to Live

Part of the point of travel is to leave your regular life behind, and to expose yourself to the unfamiliar. Think of the options as if they were relationships. A livable city is the sensible long-term option, approved of by your parents. But travel is, by definition, a short-term fling, in which you expose yourself to the unfamiliar. If you're only going to spend a couple of nights together and never see each other again, you might as well live a little.