Tehran doesn’t look that bad.
Seems pretty normal for the Mid East.
I obviously wouldn’t want to live in Lagos, Nigeria either.. but that city looks pretty modern.
It just seems like there are worse than these two.
There's definitely far worse places to live than those two. The survey was conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). I'll copy and paste from them how they're creating the so-called Livability Index:
"Every city is assigned a rating for relative comfort for over 30 qualitative and quantitative factors across five broad categories: stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. Each factor in a city is rated as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. For qualitative indicators, a rating is awarded based on the judgment of our team of expert analysts and in-city contributors. For quantitative indicators, a rating is calculated based on the relative performance of a number of external data points.
The scores are then compiled and weighted to provide a score in the range 1-100, where 1 is considered intolerable and 100 is considered ideal. The liveability rating is provided both as an overall score and as a score for each category. To provide points of reference, the score is also given for each category relative to a control city (New York) and an overall position in the ranking of 172 cities is provided.
The covid-19 pandemic has affected living conditions in many cities, owing to its impact on the healthcare infrastructure, and restrictions and lockdown measures imposed by governments, which have put the healthcare, culture and environment, and education categories under stress. The impact of the pandemic has been incorporated into our overall liveability score, with the introduction of new indicators to assess these stress and restriction levels for each city.
The liveability score is reached through category weights, which are divided equally into relevant subcategories to ensure that the score covers as many indicators as possible. Indicators are scored as acceptable, tolerable, uncomfortable, undesirable or intolerable. These are then weighted to produce a rating, where 100 indicates that liveability in a city is ideal and 1 means that it is intolerable. For qualitative variables, an “EIU rating” is awarded based on the judgment of in-house expert geography analysts and a field correspondent based in each city. For quantitative variables, a rating is calculated based on the relative performance of a location using external data."