1 Wordly Vienna – the city with the highest quality of living worldwide. Applied assemblage urbanisms. An approach. Gerhard Hatz 1 1 Department of Geography and Regional Research, University of Vienna – Vienna – Austria Keywords : urban theory, Vienna, worlding. 1. Evaluating and ranking living quality Each year ‘Mercer’, an internationally operating consulting company, publishes a survey on the living quality of cities. In the years 2009, 2010, 2012, 2014 as well as in 2015 the City of Vienna ranked first place of all the cities worldwide. Conducting and publishing surveys on the living quality of cities just as transforming the results into a ranking of cities worldwide, point at the increasing importance of worlding practices in terms of rankings as “Unique Selling Proposition” in the global competition of cities (see Roy and Ong, 2011). The survey itself is not based on an evaluation by ‘ordinary’ residents, but on a questionnaire handed over to expatriates working for international companies. The quality of living of a city is evaluated by an exclusive circle of globalized urbanites for an exclusive circle of globalized urbanites. The purpose of the ranking denotes the worlding of ‘quality of life’ as it refers to the calculation of hardship allowances, the premium compensation paid to expatriates who might experience a significant deterioration in living conditions in their host location (www.mercer.com). The evaluation of the quality of living is based on 39 factors grouped in ten categories (see Figure 1). By dissecting the factors drawn on evaluating the quality of living just few factors are directly linked to the performance of the city itself. Among others, the top ranking of Vienna in particular is based on its high level of political stability and safety, however, just to a limited extent an issue of the city government but of the Federal Administration of the Republic of Austria. Similarly, the factors listed in the categories “economic environment” are supposed to be regulated by the ‘far order of society’ at the federal level or by the administration of the EU, and the same holds true of the category ‘Socio-Cultural Environment’, ‘Media and Censorship’ or ‘Limitation on Personal Freedom’. What is more, the influence of the city administration on the availability of consumer goods is limited and on the natural environment in terms of climate and natural disasters not applicable. Not surprisingly, cities in the Northern Hemisphere, European Cities in particular, rank top (see Figure 2). Still, Vienna’s prime position is used to promote recent urban policies. As to the ranking among the best performing cities differentiations can be traced back to the ‘near order’ of local urban policies more conclusively, as categories of public services and transportation, health and sanitation, housing, and recreation. In the survey 2010 a special focus was laid on environmental sustainability, reflecting the dispositif shaping the discourses on the livability of cities. With regard to the categories of evaluation linked to local urban policies, Vienna’s performance is quite ambiguous. The city ranks on position 18 in the special survey on infrastructure in 2009 and is number 44 in the eco-ranking 2010 (www.mercer.com).