2030 Agenda

‘Barcelona is an almost ideal European city’. This is how North American consulting firm Resonance describes Barcelona in its annual The World’s Best Cities 2021 Report, which analyses the global brand of more than 200 cities with over a million inhabitants. It’s not the first time that Barcelona appears in this ranking but this 2020 it’s even more valuable because the report has taken into account new Covid-19 related factors. We can safely say that Barcelona’s image hasn’t worsened in this unprecedented situation and the Catalan capital ranks eighth best city in the world, ahead of such important European capitals as Amsterdam, Rome and Berlin, and only after London, New York, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, Dubai and Singapore. In addition, Los Angeles, ninth, and Madrid, tenth, close the Top 10 of this year’s edition.

Nightlife and cultural identity

Barcelona gets the eighth place thanks to different factors. Its location, on the seaside and with mountains, iconic architecture, great weather and authentic neighbourhoods with their own identity, classify Barcelona as the 10^th best city in the world in the Place category. However, where the city really stands out is in Nightlife, thanks to the opinions shared on the rating website TripAdvisor, that propel Barcelona to the third position in this category. It is clear that the Covid-19 can change these ratings, given the nightlife restrictions that have been implemented in Barcelona to fight the spread of the virus since last March. Nonetheless, it’s important to bear in mind that the Resonance ranking has included the users’ opinions to show the performance of the cities prior to the pandemic in some categories. In this regard, Barcelona also stands out as the 5^th best city in the world in number of opinions on TripAdvisor, which shows the interest that our city generated before the coronavirus breakout and which we’ll need to follow in the upcoming months.

Statistical performance and user-generated data

The Resonance ranking uses a unique methodology that combines standard metrics with user-generated data through the aforementioned opinions on TripAdvisor as well as the city related hashtags on Instagram or the Facebook check-ins. This is how they accomplish to give 360 degrees view of each city that results in an analysis of its global brand. To build this ranking, Resonance analyses up to 25 factors in 6 core categories:

• Place, where they take into account the city’s natural and built environments, the parks and outdoors, the sights and landmarks, the weather (average number of sunny days), the safety… and this 2020, also the number of Covid-19 infections per million (data retrieved by July 31^st 2020). We recall that Barcelona ranks 10^th in this category worldwide.
• Product, this is the ranking of the hardware of the city, including infrastructures, airport connectivity, museums, universities, convention centres…
• People, where they evaluate the diversity of the city’s population based on such indicators as the percentage of foreign-born residents and the educational attainment.
• Prosperity, to analyse the wealth of a city, The World’s Best Cities report takes into account statistics like the number of global fortunes, the GDP per capita and, this year, two new factors: the city’s Gini Index, which measures the distribution of income in a population, and the Unemployment Rate.
• Programming, this category includes factors based on user-generated opinions shared on TripAdvisor like the number of recommended cultural shows, the nightlife, the restaurants and the shopping offer.
• Promotion, finally, the ranking also analyses the promotion of the city and its ability to tell its story, especially, online. The Google search trends and volume, the Instagram hashtags and the number of opinions shared on TripAdvisor are some of the metrics that are evaluated in this category.

London, the number one city in the world

This is the sixth edition of The World’s Best Cities ranking by Resonance. With this experience, the consulting firm specialized in tourism, real estate and economic development of the cities establishes two main attributes to attract talent and visitors: prosperity and opportunity. London stands out in both as the city ranks first in this 2021 edition. The British city leads especially in the Promotion category and also in Programming, in which it ranks second in favour of New York. It’s clear that, like Barcelona and the rest of analyzed cities, London is also suffering from the lack of activities in its restaurants, theaters and other cultural and leisure venues due to the pandemic. This shift of paradigm will sure have an impact on the ranking’s 2022 edition, as well as the Brexit-effect. If there is a subcategory in which London should improve is the new Gini coefficient as it shows the alarming disparity between rich and not: London ranks 149^th of 263 cities. Will the Brexit deal redress this situation? Or will it accentuate it even more? We will have to wait until next year to find out.