Quote: (02-01-2015 07:41 PM)El Chinito loco Wrote:
Here's the usual target demographic for "best of city" lists..
If it lists a bunch of 2nd or 3rd tier cities with vanilla safe neighborhoods then it's probably targeted towards young first time home owner families and real estate investors.
If it's in the Economist, Wall street Journal, or Forbes then it's for the "upwardly mobile" salary man or woman. Toronto is a mindless office drone city so it fits the bill.
If it's on some AARP or old people's mag/site then it's for wealthy pensioners. This is especially true if Belize, Costa Rica, or some other old people's haven is mentioned.
Not a single one of these lists is for the bachelor professional or location independent income earner. None of these lists give two fucks about our demographic.
The audience is overwhelmingly SWPL types who can't even begin to think outside the box.
Precisely. Magazines pander to their readership with these kinds of articles. They're not supposed to actually mean anything;
they're supposed to make their readers feel good about decisions they've already made and lives they are already living. The readership of the Economist is a kind of third tier Davos Man. They are international, materialist and primarily concerned about their careers and creature comforts, and convenient ability to live their third tier Davos Man lifestyles. They're wealthy, but could not afford to leave their jobs because they spend much of their income on maintaining their lifestyles. Based upon
this kind of ranking, I'd say they're firmly within category E3 (with younger members and those from the unfashionable parts of the world in E4, desperately aspiring to E3 level, where they will forever remain).
Without looking at the Economist's rankings of cities, I'd say it would be comprised of the following:
Toronto and Vancouver
Maybe Boston, NYC, DC, plus SF and Chicago also
Melbourne and Sydney, maybe Auckland
London, Paris and Berlin, plus another 3-6 second/third tier European cities (e.g. Vienna, Zurich, Amsterdam)
Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai
Maybe Dubai
A couple of cities that are actually anything but edgy, but don't make the compilers of the list look entirely square and that they can, if necessary, justify as up and coming (so their readership can tell themselves that they "think outside the box"), e.g. Seoul, one random US coastal city such as Charleston (I don't know enough about which random US city would be there, but you get the idea).
Definitely off the list: Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East (aside from Dubai), most of Asia; i.e. anywhere interesting. The reason for this is primarily that the likelihood of coming in contact with the unwashed masses in such places is simply far too high/unavoidable on a day to day basis.
Again, this is because they've worked out where their readership resides, and reverse engineered it from there so everyone feels the warm fuzzies about their current life trajectories and knows their places in serving first and second tier Davos Men.