Sunday Times (Sri Lanka)

Tokyo, Singapore and Osaka named world's safest cities

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The Japanese capital is the world's safest city when it comes to digital security, health, infrastruc­ture and personal safety, according to new statistics.

Data released by the Economist's Intelligen­ce Unit has rated Tokyo as the world's safest for 2015, despite it being the most densely populated on Earth with 38million residents.

Coming in behind Tokyo in second and third place were fellow south-east Asian cities, Singapore and Osaka.

Meanwhile Europe's highest entry was Stockholm in fourth while Amsterdam in the Netherland­s made up the top ten.

Both Sydney and Melbourne are named in the top ten while the only U.S. city to make the top ten was New York.

London only managed to make 18th place on the list, with cities in the U.S. such as Los Angeles and Chicago ranking higher.

This is despite the British capital having a 89 homicides in 2012 compared to 299 in LA and 500 in Chicago.

The Economist’s ranking looked at 50 cities and chose them based on regional representa­tion and availabili­ty of data.

New York and Los Angeles lead in digital security, while Zurich takes the top spot for both health security and infrastruc­ture safety.

In terms of infrastruc­ture, Zurich came out on top while Singapore was also rated best for personal safety.

Digital security measured the quality of a city’s cyber security, the frequency of identity theft, and other factors related to digital security.

Health security was a metric look at average life expectancy of a city’s citizens as well as the ratio of hospital beds to the size of the population.

The infrastruc­ture section looked at factors like the quality of roads and the number of people who die from natural disasters.

While personal safety was a category looking at more traditiona­l safety measures like crime, the level of police engagement, and the num- ber of violent crimes. The report, backed by the UN, also rated the best cities to live, with Canadian cities Toronto and Montreal topping the list. Coming in last on the list of the top 50 cities was the Indonesian capital Jakarta, which is home to more than 10 million people.

Also making up the bottom five were Mexico City, Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Johannebur­g, Ho Chi Minh City and the Iranian capital Tehran.

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