Most Colorful City, Most Liveable City

The Ranking Headline That Got Me

JustCover's method is at least visible, which I appreciate. The company says it analysed 78 destinations, selected three representative images for each city, avoided heavy filters and color grading, and used a digital color analysis tool to count unique RGB values in the image pixels. The combined counts became a vibrancy score.

That is not nonsense. It is a real measurement of something. But the thing it measures is not "the city" in the big human sense. It measures a small set of chosen images under chosen conditions. If those images are aerial views, street-level landmarks, and recognisable neighbourhoods, then the result depends on which views got picked, what season they were shot in, what the light was doing, and what was left outside the frame.

So when the headline says "world's most colorful city," I want you to mentally add the boring but honest version underneath: "world's most colorful city according to this company's selected images and pixel-counting method." Less sexy, sure. Doesn't fit on a magazine cover. But it has the small advantage of being true, and the truth deserves a pint once in a while even if it never gets past the bouncer at the headline.

Color as Data Gets Weird Fast

Here is where the whole thing gets slippery. A pixel can tell you that an image contains a lot of unique RGB values. It can't tell you how a place feels when you're standing there sweating through your shirt, dodging scooters, smelling grilled meat, and trying to work out whether the pavement is public space or someone's kitchen now.

It also can't tell you whether one city feels visually intense because it has painted buildings, another because it has chaotic signage, another because of markets, another because the trees and sky are doing half the work. Those are different kinds of color. A ranking flattens them into one number and then struts off acting like the number has solved the argument.

This isn't me saying JustCover did something evil. If anything, their methodology note makes the limitation easier to see. The bollocks starts when a neat measurement becomes a grand cultural verdict, and then the rest of us pass it around as if "ranked eighth in one photo-based vibrancy score" means the same thing as "objectively the eighth most colorful city on Earth, signed and notarised by the universe."

It does not.

Same Trick, Different Label

And it is not just color. The city-ranking machine has a label for everything.

The Economist Intelligence Unit's Global Liveability Index assesses 173 cities using more than 30 indicators across stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure, then weights them into a score from 1 to 100. That's a serious methodology and it's useful for some questions. It still doesn't tell you whether you will feel at home there, whether your rent will wreck you, whether your friends will be lonely, or whether the city will make sense with your job, passport, body, language, money, and tolerance for winter. "Liveable" in the spreadsheet sense and "liveable" in the I-can-actually-stand-this-place sense are not the same animal.

Time Out's 2026 Best Cities list used responses from more than 24,000 people across 150 cities plus votes from more than 100 Time Out city experts. It ranked Melbourne first and Hanoi twenty-fifth. Useful? Sure. Fun? Absolutely. Final truth? Come on. The Guardian's coverage of that list pointed out the "vibes" problem pretty plainly: survey design, self-selection, sample size, and expert input all shape the outcome. Run the same survey through TikTok and Melbourne might lose to wherever sells the prettiest matcha that month.

Resonance's World's Best Cities methodology does something else again: it combines core statistics from more than 400 cities with resident and visitor perception indicators, including user-generated data from online platforms, then frames the result through Livability, Lovability, and Prosperity. Again, not fake. Just specific. Change the inputs and weights, and the "best" city can change with them. Move a few sliders and suddenly Vienna is winning everything. Move them the other way and it's Singapore. Move them once more and it's a town in New Zealand nobody has heard of.

That's the bit I want you to hold onto. "Most liveable" isn't the same claim as "most exciting." "Most colorful" isn't the same claim as "most beautiful." "Best" is usually a polite little trench coat hiding a pile of choices about what counts.

The Publicity Machine

Why does this stuff keep appearing? Because it works.

I can't prove from these sources that a single ranking directly increases tourism, investment, or bookings, so I'm not going to pretend I can. But I can say this: the JustCover ranking became coverage in places like Time Out, Condé Nast Traveller, and Euronews within days. That's media exposure. And for the company publishing the ranking, it's also content marketing. The JustCover article sits on a travel insurance site and ends by nudging readers toward insurance before their next city break. A study with a pixel-counter as the lead author and a "buy travel insurance" button as the closing credits. Fair play, but let's call the thing what it is.

For travel writers and bloggers, including me, these rankings are dangerously convenient. You want a line that gives your post more punch? Easy: "recently named one of the world's most blah cities by XYZ." It sounds authoritative. It sounds researched. It lets your opinion borrow someone else's spreadsheet and walk around wearing a blazer.

I'm not excluding myself here. I've absolutely felt the temptation. A ranking gives you a tidy hook, and tidy hooks get clicks, and clicks pay for the wine. But if I use one, I owe you the boring details: who made it, what they measured, what they ignored, and whether the headline is stronger than the evidence underneath.