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.
