In the two years since we published the inaugural Safe
Cities Index, the world’s urban population is estimated to
have grown by more than 150m people, raising the total
number of people living in cities to above 4bn. More than
90% of the increase in urbanisation over this period
occurred in the developing world, where massive migration
from rural areas has continued to accelerate. In the
developed world, however, the size of most cities remained
roughly the same, with some cities even beginning to shrink
in those countries with ageing and declining populations.
The results of the 2017 Safe Cities Index, which now covers
60 cities, again show a sharp divide in overall levels of
safety between the fast urbanising developing world and the
stagnant developed world. The top three cities in the index
are unchanged from 2015, with Tokyo, Singapore and Osaka
ranked first, second and third and still separated by mere
tenths of a point. Likewise, the remainder of the top ten
continues to be comprised of mainly Asian and European
cities.
At the bottom of the Index is one of the ten new cities
added in 2017: Karachi. Although it performs poorly across
all of the categories, it was dragged down by a very low
level of personal security (60th). This is a reflection of a
number of factors, but the main reason is that among the
cities in the index, it experiences by far the most frequent
and most severe terrorist attacks. Jakarta, which ranked
last in 2015, is 57th this year, pulled from the bottom by
the addition of Karachi and other cities like Yangon and
Dhaka.
In 2017 only one city in the developing world cracks the top
half of the index, Buenos Aires, which places 29th, between
two Middle Eastern cities, Abu Dhabi (28th) and Doha (30th).
Two other Middle Eastern cities, Jeddah (42nd) and Riyadh
(47th), are the worst performing of the 21 cities from the
developed world, having scored below average in all of the
four categories and particularly poorly in the
infrastructure and personal security categories.
