Prospective Thriving Cities: Copenhagen, Osaka, and Melbourne

The Global Liveability Index (GLI) served as the initial screening instrument for identifying candidate thriving cities. Published annually by the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Index evaluates 173 global cities across five domains: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education, and infrastructure. Cities were selected first according to their overall rank and then sequentially by the next highest-ranking cities, with exclusions applied to avoid geographic clustering among those already selected. This geographic disqualification criterion was intentionally employed to enhance regional diversity within the study sample. Following this selection process, the Human Development Index (HDI) was examined for each study city to assess whether high levels of urban liveability were accompanied by correspondingly high levels of human flourishing, thereby providing an additional layer of validation for the designation of these cities as thriving.

Current index data is available, however, the scope of selection was limited from 2020 to 2024 because corresponding violence data would be more accessible for that date range. The table below list the top ranked cities.

NA = Not Available

“Thriving” is best treated as a multidimensional urban achievement rather than a brand label: a city qualifies insofar as its institutions and built form reliably convert collective resources into broadly shared capabilities (health, mobility, safety, belonging, meaningful work, and access to nature and culture) over time. Across Copenhagen, Osaka, and Melbourne, the most defensible scholarly case is not that each city is “perfect,” but that each has assembled a comparatively resilient package of (1) welfare-and-governance capacity, (2) human-scaled mobility and public realm investments, and (3) planning systems that, despite real tradeoffs, have repeatedly translated policy intent into lived experience.

Copenhagen as a Thriving City Prospect

In Copenhagen, the argument for thriving is strongly supported by the city’s long-run orientation toward the “public life” of streets and squares and by transport choices that embed health and social contact into routine movement. The Copenhagen tradition associated with Jan Gehl frames urban quality not primarily as iconic architecture but as the everyday conditions that make walking, cycling, lingering, and informal encounter normal and safe (Gehl and Gemzøe 2004). That orientation matters for thriving because public space is not only aesthetic; it is an infrastructure for low-cost sociality, perceived safety, and civic trust, all of which are well-established correlates of subjective well-being in urban research (Mouratidis 2021). Copenhagen’s cycling system, meanwhile, is often discussed in purely instrumental terms (mode share, emissions), but critical mobilities scholarship stresses that cycling there also functions as a “commons” whose benefits are social and political, shaping how residents experience belonging, rights-of-way, and mutual visibility in the city (Freudendal-Pedersen 2015). Taken together, Copenhagen’s public-realm and active-mobility choices plausibly operate through multiple well-being pathways identified in the planning literature: travel becomes less stressful and more health-promoting, leisure and social relationships are easier to sustain, and the city’s sensory environment (noise, safety, aesthetics) becomes less punitive for ordinary life (Mouratidis 2021). A vigilant account, however, should also note that “thriving” can be unevenly distributed even in high-performing contexts; the same governance capacity that produces exemplary public goods can coexist with contestation over who benefits most from central-city quality, how costs are allocated, and whether sustainability transitions are socially and politically inclusive (Freudendal-Pedersen 2015; Mouratidis 2021).

Osaka as a Thriving City Prospect

Osaka qualifies as a thriving city on somewhat different but complementary grounds: it exemplifies a metropolitan fabric in which density, rail-oriented accessibility, and fine-grained mixed urbanism can sustain daily life with comparatively low dependence on private automobiles, while policy discourse increasingly targets aging and population change through compact-city and network strategies. Morphological research on Osaka-Kobe emphasizes the region’s high compacity and complex patchwork of urban fabrics, shaped by redevelopment and rail-centered metropolitan growth (Perez 2019). For thriving, that physical structure matters because it can shorten distances between housing, services, and work, enabling the “access-to-opportunity” dimension of quality of life while also supporting the health pathway linked to walkability and routine activity (Mouratidis 2021). Empirical work in the Osaka metropolitan fringe shows that “walkability” is not merely a lifestyle amenity but can be associated with sustainability outcomes, though the direction and strength of effects vary by residential cluster type (Kato 2020). This is important for a flourishing lens because it rejects one-size-fits-all urbanism: thriving in Osaka depends on tailoring interventions to the lived geography of different neighborhoods (dense inner fabrics, older new towns, peripheral clusters), rather than assuming that a single design recipe will translate everywhere (Kato 2020). At the governance level, research on transit-oriented development and compact-city policy in Japan highlights how demographic decline and the problem of “urban perforation” push planners toward station-area strategies, land-use concentration, and networked accessibility as a means of sustaining services and social life with fewer people (Aoki 2022). A critical engagement should acknowledge, though, that compactness can also magnify vulnerability if the gains of accessibility are offset by localized environmental burdens, disaster risk, or uneven reinvestment; Osaka’s thriving claim is strongest where rail access, neighborhood services, and public-space quality cohere for a broad share of residents, not only for the most advantaged station areas (Kato 2020; Aoki 2022).

Melbourne as a Thriving City Prospect

Melbourne’s thriving credentials are frequently narrated through the language of “liveability,” but the scholarly interest lies in the policy and governance sequence that made the city center and many inner neighborhoods more workable for everyday life, and in the analytic frameworks Australians have developed to measure liveability as a public-health and equity issue rather than as lifestyle marketing. A policy-success account of Melbourne emphasizes deliberate moves by city and state governments to transform the central city from a declining and inhospitable environment into a place where living, working, and cultural participation became mutually reinforcing (Blomkamp and Lewis 2019). This aligns with a thriving-city lens insofar as governance capacity is judged by the durability of public goods: coherent planning, investment in civic amenities, and institutional coordination that converts economic development into safer streets, cultural vitality, and a usable public realm (Blomkamp and Lewis 2019). Australia’s urban-health scholarship strengthens this claim by linking liveability to measurable determinants of well-being, including access to services, public transport, open space, local employment, food environments, and social cohesion (Badland et al. 2014). That literature is particularly valuable for a flourishing frame because it treats “quality of life” not as a ranking outcome but as a policy field with explicit distributional stakes. Indeed, more recent empirical work mapping liveability across Australian cities finds substantial spatial and socioeconomic inequities, with inner areas often more liveable than outer suburbs and disadvantaged areas frequently having worse access to the infrastructures that support health and daily functioning (Giles-Corti et al. 2022). Melbourne can therefore qualify as thriving while still being ethically incomplete: a city may excel on cultural life, parks, and central-city amenity yet face a thriving deficit where housing affordability, peripheral access, or transport-service equity undermines the broad-based convertibility of resources into lived capabilities (Badland et al. 2014; Giles-Corti et al. 2022).

What unifies Copenhagen, Osaka, and Melbourne, then, is not a single urban form but a recurring institutional accomplishment: each city has, in different ways, built systems that make everyday life easier to coordinate and less costly in time, stress, and risk. Copenhagen’s model leans on the public realm and active mobility as engines of health, sociability, and trust (Gehl and Gemzøe 2004; Freudendal-Pedersen 2015). Osaka’s model leans on density, rail accessibility, and compact-network planning that can sustain opportunity and services through demographic change (Perez 2019; Aoki 2022). Melbourne’s model leans on policy capacity to regenerate urban cores and on a measurement culture that increasingly defines liveability as a set of social determinants rather than a prestige label (Blomkamp and Lewis 2019; Badland et al. 2014). In the quality-of-life literature, these are precisely the kinds of interventions that operate along multiple well-being pathways at once: travel becomes more reliable and healthy, leisure and nature access become more attainable, social relationships become easier to maintain, and the emotional texture of the city becomes less adversarial (Mouratidis 2021). A thriving designation is therefore defensible when these pathways are not episodic but institutionalized, and when the benefits are sufficiently broad that the city’s “headline” successes are not purchased by quietly externalizing harm or exclusion to particular districts or groups (Giles-Corti et al. 2022; Mouratidis 2021).

In short, Copenhagen, Osaka, and Melbourne qualify as thriving cities because each has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to translate planning, infrastructure, and governance into durable, everyday capabilities: safe and pleasant movement; accessible services and cultural life; and a public realm that supports belonging. The most careful scholarly conclusion is comparative and conditional: these cities look “thriving” not because they lack problems, but because their institutional arrangements have been unusually effective at producing the concrete, lived preconditions of flourishing, even as ongoing equity and sustainability tensions remain central to whether thriving is experienced by most residents rather than celebrated by the city’s most visible districts (Badland et al. 2014; Giles-Corti et al. 2022).

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Brandon Blankenship

Brandon L. Blankenship is a speaker, assistant professor, facilitator, and advisor. His work is concentrated on the impact of leadership on law, ethics, and community.

He's been happily married for over 30 years. He and his wife, Donnalee, work with nearly /newlywed couples, married couples who want to improve their marriage, and couples in crisis.

Latest posts by Brandon Blankenship (see all)

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References
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Badland, Hannah, et al., Urban liveability: Emerging lessons from Australia for exploring the potential for indicators to measure the social determinants of health. Social Science & Medicine, Volume 111, 2014, Pages 64-73, ISSN 0277-9536,
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Blomkamp, Emma, and Jenny M. Lewis. “‘Marvellous Melbourne’: Making the World’s Most Liveable City.” In Great Policy Successes, edited by Paul ‘t Hart and Mallory Compton, 113–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198843719.003.0005.

Freudendal-Pedersen, M. (2015). Whose Commons are Mobilities Spaces? – The Case of Copenhagen’s Cyclists. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 14(2), 598–621. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v14i2.1188

Gehl, J & Gemzøe, L 2004, Public spaces – public life. Arkitektens Forlag, Kbh.

Giles-Corti, Billie et al. Creating healthy and sustainable cities: what gets measured, gets done. The Lancet Global Health, Volume 10, Issue 6, e782 – e785

Kato, Haruka. “Effect of Walkability on Urban Sustainability in the Osaka Metropolitan Fringe Area.” Sustainability 12, no. 21 (2020): 9248. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12219248.

Mouratidis, Kostas. Urban planning and quality of life: A review of pathways linking the built environment to subjective well-being, Cities, Volume 115, 2021, 103229, ISSN 0264-2751, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2021.103229.

Perez, Joan, Alessandro Araldi, Giovanni Fusco, and Takashi Fuse. “The Character of Urban Japan: Overview of Osaka-Kobe’s Cityscapes.” Urban Science 3, no. 4 (2019): 105, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci3040105.