After nearly a decade of topping livability studies, the city has slipped to number three behind Melbourne and Vienna according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest Global Livability Survey.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider, PNG

Click here to see the 10 most livable cities of 2011, according to EIU.

Vancouver is no longer the best place in the world to live. After nearly a decade of topping livability studies, the city has slipped to number three behind Melbourne and Vienna, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest Global Livability Survey.

It was not the riots that did it. Instead it was an adjustment in Vancouver’s score for transport infrastructure, “reflecting recent intermittent closures of the key Malahat highway that resulted in a 0.7 percentage point decline in the city’s overall livability rating,” said the report.

The June riot came too late in the year to affect livability, the report said, but could lead to further downward revisions of Vancouver’s overall score in future surveys.

Overall, there was only a difference of 0.2 points between Melbourne (97.5) and Vancouver (97.2). The top three cities stacked up equivalent points for the indicators of stability, health care and education, with Vancouver scoring much higher than Melbourne and Vienna for culture and environment (100 as opposed to 95.1 and 94.4 respectively). The only place it stumbled was in terms of infrastructure — scoring 92.9 in the face of a perfect score of 100 by the other two cities.

Seven of the top ten cities are in Australia and Canada. Toronto ranked fourth and Calgary fifth.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s livability rating is an annual survey aimed to quantify “the challenges that might be presented to an individual’s lifestyle in any given location, and allows for direct comparison between locations.”

Here are the world's 10 most livable cities, according to the EIU:

1. Melbourne, Australia

2. Vienna, Austria

3. Vancouver, Canada

4. Toronto, Canada

5. Calgary, Canada

6. Sydney, Australia

7. Helsinki, Finland

8. Perth, Australia

9. Adelaide, Australia

10. Auckland, New Zealand