Believe it or not: Karachi is world’s ‘least safe’ city!

A Safe Cities Index 2017, produced by The Economist Intelligence Unit, shows that Karachi is the ‘least safe’ city in the world with Tokyo being the safest.

“Although it performs poorly across all of the categories, it was dragged down by a very low level of personal security (60th). This is a reflection of a number of factors, but the main reason is that among the cities in the index, it experiences by far the most frequent and most severe terrorist attacks,” the report mentioned.

“Of the ten cities at the bottom of the overall index, three are in South-east Asia (Manila, Ho Chi Minh City and Jakarta), two are in South Asia (Dhaka and Karachi) and two are in the Middle East and Africa (Cairo and Tehran),” the report further states.

Europe (Madrid, Barcelona, Stockholm, Amsterdam and Zurich) and Asia-Pacific (Singapore, Wellington, Hong Kong, Melbourne and Sydney) dominate the world’s top 10 safest cities list.

Surprisingly, no US city has made it to the top 10 safest cities list, with San Francisco entering as the 20th safest city in the world, according to the report.

All the countries— 60 in total— were rated on the basis of four categories, namely, digital security, health security, personal security and infrastructure security.

“In 2017 only one city in the developing world cracks the top half of the index, Buenos Aires, which places 29th, between two Middle Eastern cities, Abu Dhabi (28th) and Doha (30th). Two other Middle Eastern cities, Jeddah (42nd) and Riyadh (47th), are the worst performing of the 21 cities from the developed world, having scored below average in all of the four categories and particularly poorly in the infrastructure and personal security categories,” the report adds.