The World’s Best Cities in 2021 Revealed

A leading advisor in tourism, real estate and economic development, Resonance’s Best Cities rankings quantify and benchmark the relative quality of place, reputation and competitive identity for the world’s principal cities with metropolitan populations of one million or more.

They are lauded as the world’s most thorough city ranking, based on original methodology that analyzes key statistics as well as user-generated reviews and online activity in channels such as Google, Facebook and Instagram.

“The World’s Best Cities rankings are composed of experiential factors that people consider most important in choosing a city to live and visit, as well as empirical factors that business decision-makers consider important for business or investment,” says Resonance President & CEO Chris Fair.

As a result, Resonance’s Best Cities rankings don’t just consider cities as places to live, work or visit, but take a more holistic approach using a wide range of factors that show positive correlations with attracting employment, investment and/or visitors. These range from the number of culinary experiences and museums, to the number of Global 500 corporations, direct flight connections and mentions each city has on Instagram.

Based on each city’s performance in the 25 factors analyzed, these are the World’s Best Cities for 2021:

1) London, England
2) New York City, USA
3) Paris, France
4) Moscow, Russia
5) Tokyo, Japan
6) Dubai, United Arab Emirates
7) Singapore, Republic of Singapore
8) Barcelona, Spain
9) Los Angeles, USA
10) Madrid, Spain

The full ranking of the top 100 cities is available at BestCities.org/Reports/2021-Worlds-Best-Cities/

And why does a ranking of the world’s cities matter now?

“The data collected for this year’s rankings provides a snapshot of the performance of these cities leading into the pandemic,” says Resonance President & CEO Chris Fair. “A year from now, we’ll be able to look at how COVID-19 has affected each of these cities and see which ones prove to be the most resilient during this crisis.”