Is Philly the 11th-Best City on the Planet?

A business school in Spain seems to think so.

Folks who have embraced our city’s lovable inferiority complex are going to have a hard time making sense of this: Philadelphia has been named the 11th-best city on the planet by IESE Business School in Spain, part of its annual Cities in Motion Index (ICIM)

Seriously. We’re better than Amsterdam. We’re the second-best American city on the list. Here’s the Top 20 list:

  1. Tokyo
  2. London
  3. New York
  4. Zürich
  5. Paris
  6. Geneva
  7. Basel
  8. Osaka
  9. Seoul
  10. Oslo
  11. Philadelphia
  12. Los Angeles
  13. Dallas
  14. Copenhagen
  15. Eindhoven
  16. Amsterdam
  17. Sydney
  18. Stockholm
  19. Chicago
  20. Baltimore

Megan Willet at Business Insider explains:

To establish the ranking, researchers studied 135 cities across 55 countries, and based their results on over 50 indicators along 10 different dimensions including governance, public management, urban planning, technology, environment, international outreach, social cohesion, mobility and transportation, human capital (ability to attract talent), and economy.

Well, um….

Before you get too skeptical, consider the auspicious timing of a new column from Deborah Diamond of Campus Philly and Steve Wray  of the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia. Philly, they say in the Philadelphia Business Journal, is becoming a “brain magnet.” It’s mostly a celebration of Campus Philly’s 10th anniversary, but it offers reasons to think we’re awesome:

The future for Philadelphia is exciting. We are now a net population winner over New York City (more people move from there to here than from here to there). Enrollment is growing at our regional colleges and universities, providing even more opportunity for Philadelphia to add young, educated residents.

So maybe we are all that.