Global Cities Index 2026
Oxford Economics
Oxford Economics ranks the world's 1,000 largest cities on economics, human capital, quality of life, environment and governance, combining historical data with its own forecasts.
Browse research
The Future of World Heritage Cities: Heritage Governance and New Urban Commons
Urban Planning (Cogitatio) · Urban Planning
Discusses how World Heritage cities are governed and how heritage could be approached as a new form of urban commons.
SDG 11 Global Synthesis Report 2026
UN-Habitat · SDG 11 Synthesis Report
UN-Habitat's periodic review of progress on Sustainable Development Goal 11 (sustainable cities), presented in July 2026; it records some gains but warns the housing crisis threatens overall progress.
EIU Global Liveability Index 2026
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)
The annual EIU ranking scores 173 cities on 30 indicators across stability, healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure, based on a May 2026 survey.
World Cities Report 2026: The Global Housing Crisis – Pathways to Action
UN-Habitat · World Cities Report (biennial)
UN-Habitat's flagship biennial report, launched at the 13th World Urban Forum in Baku, is devoted to the worldwide housing crisis and how planning, governance and finance can respond.
Global patterns of urban heat shaped by climate and morphology
Nature Communications · Nature Communications 17:6445
Separates the heat-island contribution of background climate from that of surrounding urban form across 2,213 cities and projects how each will change.
Trees halve urban heat island effect globally but unequal benefits only modestly mitigate climate-change warming
The Nature Conservancy · Nature Communications 17:3569
A global estimate of how much existing urban tree canopy lowers air temperature in 8,919 large cities, and how far trees can offset future climate warming.
Street View Imagery Analysis in a Computational Notebook
REGION (ERSA) · REGION 13(1): 43–60
A hands-on methods chapter showing how to download street view images and apply deep convolutional networks to detect and measure features of the built environment, in a reproducible notebook.
Learning street view representations based on a spatiotemporal contrastive learning framework
Computers, Environment and Urban Systems · Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 125, 102393
Benchmarks representation-learning strategies for street view imagery and introduces a spatiotemporal contrastive framework to learn features useful for perception and socioeconomic prediction tasks.
Global Power City Index 2025
Mori Memorial Foundation – Institute for Urban Strategies
The Mori Memorial Foundation evaluates 48 major cities on 72 indicators across economy, R&D, cultural interaction, liveability, environment and accessibility, and adds a new startup-ecosystem index.
2025 Global Cities Report
Kearney
Kearney's annual report pairs the Global Cities Index (158 cities, 31 metrics) with a forward-looking Outlook, framing city competitiveness around readiness for the "intelligence age".