"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears ... You take delight not in a city's seven or 70 wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours or to the question it asks you, forcing you to answer... "

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- Italo Calvino, in his Invisible Cities

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Australia's much-mocked federal capital city (the Economist has called it "Pyongyang without the dystopia" and Bill Bryson thought it deserved the tourism promotional slogan "Canberra: why wait for death?") has just been declared the best city on earth for Quality of Life.

Yes, Oxford Economics [OE] has released its 2026 Global Cities Index, its ranking of 1000 of the world's cities across five categories: Economics, Human Capital, Quality of Life, Environment and Governance.

And much-derided Canberra (Dame Edna Everage used to screech that Canberra was gorgeous because it was so sweetly located one could get on a plane there and soon "be somewhere really interesting") did so well across all the categories that OE ranks it the 45th best city in all the world.

What are thinking Canberrans to make of OE's flattering ranking of our strange, still pre-pubescent little city?

Are contented Canberrans already so smugly sure that they live in the planet's top metroparadise that they feel OE's findings are as superfluous as a finding that the Pope is a Roman Catholic or that Donald Trump is a narcissist?

A week is a long time in Canberra and I have lived in Canberra for almost 50 years (Bill Bryson would think this 50 years of living death) and so ought to welcome OE's endorsement of my decision to put down roots here.

And yet as a typically intellectual and overthinking Canberran, I find myself wondering if so nebulous a concept as Quality of Life can ever be properly measured.

Oxford Economics seems mostly to have placed special emphasis on........

© Canberra Times